This is the fourth part of a series. In Thought #174 I wrote about my father’s Consul typewriter and the touch-typing course in Olbernhau, in Thought #175 about SELFHTML, english-test.net and my expensive detours through agencies, and in Thought #430 about a single day in the terminal with Gemini and Claude Code. Today I want to take a step back and ask: what does all this mean for the balance of power in the web industry?
Look at the reference lists of Eastern European outsourcing agencies in Ukraine, Poland or Belarus and you see beautiful screenshots. What you don’t see is how many of those projects ever paid off. My impression after more than twenty years in this business is sobering: most of them didn’t.
For solo founders and small business owners the maths was always the same: put €30,000 to €70,000 on the table just to test an idea. The client carried one hundred percent of the risk. The agency got paid whether the product ever earned a single euro or not. I estimate that around 80 percent of the creative work in the web economy is never rewarded. It lies in a graveyard of expired domains and discontinued apps.
Even the giants don’t invent everything themselves. In 2003 Google bought Applied Semantics, whose technology for matching ads to content went into AdSense. In 2007 it agreed to buy DoubleClick, a deal completed in 2008. Google didn’t wait for its own lab to finish the job – it bought the know-how while the window was open.
english-test.net succeeded because we were right inside that historical window: Google needed publishers, AdSense paid well, forums and practice sites were thriving. When I later built english.best with an external agency, the window had closed. The peak of the AdSense publishers was over, and so was the forum era. What remained was a big agency bill for a project that could no longer be monetised that way. The problem wasn’t the idea. The problem was that a single attempt cost so much that you only ever got one.
There’s another side that people rarely talk about. Many traditional web agencies I got to know in Eastern Europe are surprisingly patriarchal on the inside. At the top sit one or more male owners. Below them work mostly women – in project management, QA, design and support. Often on short contracts, without real security, and with the feeling that they can be replaced by someone younger at any time.
And yet, in my experience, these women are often more ambitious, more dedicated and more disciplined than the owners, who hold their power mainly through capital, formal ownership and old networks. And precisely because of that discipline, they are often more creative and at the same time more precise.
I see this at home, too. My wife can draw and craft wonderfully – and yet in many cases she has a better technical understanding than I do, because alongside her creativity she is strong in logic and mathematics.
What the women in these firms still almost never get is ownership or a real stake. They carry the work, but not the value they create.
And now something new is happening: for the first time, a technological upheaval doesn’t hit the people at the bottom first, but the owners at the top. AI is taking away their gatekeeping monopoly. Anyone who used to need an agency just to get a website now needs a terminal and a clear vision. The power balance is reversing.
AI and these new tools no longer belong to the “big men”. Women who bring together creativity, precision and logical thinking can now express their ideas, their perspectives and even their fears, and build their own space on the web – without a traditional coding background, without a €50,000 budget and without male gatekeeper networks. UNO.TEAM gladly accompanies and supports them on this path and shows how to make AI and new technology their own.
None of this needs a bureaucratic legal shell. Real cooperation lives from the spirit of mutual trust – just as Mara Zepeda and Jennifer Brandel described in their 2016 Medium essay “Sex & Startups”, which sparked the Zebras Unite movement.
They wanted to move away from a patriarchal startup and agency culture obsessed with disrupting, crushing, owning and killing, and ruled by what Rebecca Solnit, quoting a friend, calls “the tyranny of the quantifiable”. And to return to “mundane” ideals in the original sense of the word: ideals that belong to the world. It’s about repairing, cultivating and connecting, about money and meaning over the long haul – and about seeing people as contributors, not heroes.
That is exactly how we want to work at UNO.TEAM: on equal footing, not from above.
I believe that over the next six to fifteen months we will see a tectonic shift. It’s not only the bloated website builders – Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Webador, 1&1 – that are losing their purpose. The whole Scrum universe is starting to wobble too: Scrum Masters, expensive certifications, endless sprint ceremonies, dailies, retros and refinements. All of that was an answer to one problem: many people had to coordinate painstakingly in order to write code. When one person with a good agent achieves in hours what used to take a team weeks, that answer loses its question.
When Gmail launched in April 2004, one gigabyte of storage was a sensation. Today my Google Workspace has more than a terabyte. Three million words of text plus my photos take up barely one percent of it. Storage is no longer an issue – it’s simply there.
The same thing is happening with tokens right now. In my experience I get many times more effective work out of the same tokens with Claude Code in the terminal than with IDE interfaces like Antigravity – it feels like up to twenty times as much, because the agent reads and acts in a targeted way instead of bloating the context. On top of that comes competition: US models against Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Qwen. Germany and Russia play practically no role at the top of this foundation-model race. I expect that competition to push token prices down by another 50 to 80 percent.
What does that mean for founders? You used to have to ration a €30,000 budget: a quiz or three languages? Search or scripts? Today costs are capped, and creativity is free. The long tail of ideas – the many small, idiosyncratic projects that could never afford an agency – gets a real chance for the first time.
I don’t hold a grudge against the agencies I worked with. I learned a lot from them, and some of them did very good work. But the model in which one person carries all the risk, another holds all the power and the people in between own nothing has had its time. The boy with the Consul typewriter is now at the wheel himself – and he wants to share the steering with others.
Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
