The TEMU-fication of software: cheap, abundant, and increasingly hard to sell

A sharp essay maps the commoditization of digital goods and software onto the TEMU playbook—and asks what's left when everything ships at near-zero marginal cost.

In plain terms: Software, digital tools, and online services are going the way of fast fashion—mass-produced, cheap, and flooding a market that's running out of buyers who care. The essay asks what this means for anyone building something that lasts.

The TEMU analogy is sharper than it sounds. TEMU didn't just lower prices—it restructured buyer expectations, supplier economics, and what "quality" means in a given category. The author applies the same lens to software: AI-assisted development is compressing the time and cost to ship a functional tool toward zero, meaning the supply of "good enough" software is expanding faster than demand for any given category.

The consequence: feature parity arrives faster, differentiation windows shrink, and the market segments into a small tier of trusted, essential tools and a vast commodity layer of interchangeable alternatives. The pattern already played out in stock photos, music production samples, and SEO content—AI is now running the same playbook on software.

So what: For builders, the implication is uncomfortable: technical execution is no longer a defensible moat in most categories. The durable edge shifts to distribution, trust, and user-specific context—things that can't be replicated by spinning up a new AI-generated competitor. For the ecosystem as a whole, the TEMU-fication of software likely accelerates consolidation around a few dominant platforms. Build for the platform or build for the niche. The middle is where TEMU wins.