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JB Jacob Bennett Jacob Bennett Web developer and podcaster in the Laravel community, covering Laravel releases, Laracon, Laravel Cloud and the Laravel AI SDK. Co-hosts the Laravel News Podcas...

“It's hard to look at these things that are just doing crud and feel like, oh, well, I'll pay for that. It's like, I could have that built in a day and it would be so much easier. I would pay for it once and not be on a subscription and I can host it myself and I'm done.”

North Meets South Web Podcast · Laravel Ecosystem · October 2026

“It's hard to look at these things that are just doing crud and feel like, oh, well, I'll pay for that. It's like, I could have that built in a day and it would be so much easier. I would pay for it once and not be on a subscription and I can host it myself and I'm done.” — Jacob Bennett, North Meets South Web Podcast

Bennett on SignUp Genius, the ad-heavy form tool the parents at his kids' school use. He's close to building a free replacement on a Cloudflare worker, and says he'll keep paying only for software that solves a genuinely hard problem.

Transcript

North Meets South Web Podcast Around 24:44 into the episode
Jake Bennett

…that you bought as a SaaS, not any piece of software. Like I'm still paying for tuple, right? Like it's a complex problem to solve. And it's like, you know, you got to get it right sort of thing. But like this trivial sort of crud anything, which is basically everything we've been talking about.

Michael Dyrynda

Yeah.

Jake Bennett

Is just, it's like that sort of section or segment of the market as far as like people organizing your information for you is just so inexpensive anymore. And you can't justify the cost of these things. And like paper form, right? Or like type type form, whatever these things are, which is basically just like a fancy form. That's it. Like, man alive, that is so simple. There's this one called Sign Up Genius. Have you ever heard of this? Sign up genius? Okay. It's just a signup form thing. And like, for some reason, all the moms at our school end up using it. And I just hate it. It's so god-awful. It looks terrible. It's like full of ads. And I'm about, I'm right on the cusp of being like, I'm just going to make something that's just called sign up smarty or something. I don't know. But and just be like, it's just so bad. I'm like, it looks. terrible and I'll provide it for free. It costs, it'll cost nothing to run on like a Cloudflare worker or something. It's not that big of a deal. But you, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to look at these things…

Michael Dyrynda

Sure. There's like definitely more software being written. There's not more software being sold.

Jake Bennett

Oh my gosh. Yes. That's exactly correct. That is exactly correct. We are pushing so many features. It's unreal how much stuff we're getting done at work. So many things we're building. Tell you what. The amount of stuff

Michael Dyrynda

that is being done can be done is possible. And yet I'm doing an integration at the moment that we like started in. We kick off the conversation, I think, like this time last year. And then February was the last week. Are you serious? Like the last we heard from this partner was in February. Oh…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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