From Code to Care: How Zero-Cost Software Is Reshaping Healthcare

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a banker who told me bluntly: “Your pricing is too low for healthcare. You should charge more.”

It was a fair comment in the old world of enterprise software, where scarcity of engineers and long development cycles justified high prices. But that world is disappearing so I argued that prices aren't going up, they're going down. In fact, they'll keep dropping, because AI is driving the marginal cost of building software toward zero. And that AI is very good at solving real operational pain points.

That exchange stuck with me. It forced me to reflect not just on pricing, but on how profoundly this shift is going to reshape healthcare, and the tech industry as a whole. If code is becoming a commodity software that can be spun up in minutes, then code itself stops being the differentiator. The real differentiation is moving up the stack: the data you own and how you use it, the trust you can earn from patients, providers, and regulators, and the ecosystem you can orchestrate around it. McKinsey called this the “new economics of enterprise technology.” Goldman Sachs described it as “software deflation.” Different words, same conclusion: the value of raw code is collapsing.

Competition Is Infinite, Success Requires Velocity and Trust

In that scenario competition is effectively infinite and success will be for those who can launch the best and the fastest as well as delivering trust, compliance, and scale in messy, real-world contexts like healthcare.

I really believe that just like social networks won by owning the network, the next winners will own agent marketplaces, healthcare AI platforms, and trusted operating layers. It is a platform play embedding all the characteristics of velocity, excellence, domain expertise and trust. Personally, I like the idea of a world where we rely on AI agents that spin up, adapt, and retire on demand and where the cost of software is zero but context, alignment and orchestration is the secret sauce (I like this one more than MOAT).

Why This Matters in Healthcare

Why does this matter in healthcare? Let's go back to the banker and her advice to charge more; it made sense in the past. But it misses the bigger picture, in healthcare, as in other industries, the real value will not come from the cost of code, it will come from the trust we build, the compliance we guarantee, and the human-centered design we bring to critical systems solving real problems such as inefficiency. The cost of building software is heading to zero. But the cost of earning trust, aligning with regulation, and building ecosystems that actually work in healthcare, that's where tomorrow's value will be created.

— Sam De Brouwer, CEO and Co-Founder of XY.AI Labs