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# Down The Cost Ladder, The End of The Health Tech Market?
- URL: https://marginsofcare.com/down-the-cost-ladder-the-end-of-the-health-tech-market/
- Published: 2026-11-04T21:10:49.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-05T06:22:02.000Z
- Author: Eva Worst

The cost of launching a tech company has been going down for decades. What used to cost a couple of million euros now costs a few hundred. And with every step down the cost curve - or down the cost ladder - it became easier and cheaper to launch new companies.

![Tech Cost Ladder](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/96/3196e6e7-a692-4a81-823d-4b6678f19732/content/images/2026/11/Tech-Cost-Ladder.jpg)

Initially everything had to be built from scratch. Entrepreneurs needed to assemble their own physical workstations and figure out their own physical supply chain. The arrival of the PC and the internet changed that, as it provided a powerful standard workstation and access to a commercial network that was not existing before.

Armed with computers to develop on, the next bottleneck was setting up expensive on-premise server rooms in order to run the software that was being developed. The cloud provided server capacity for rent, which meant you could immediately deploy your software and make it accessible for customers, without the need to build any physical infrastructure yourself.

Until recently, the cost factor was software production, which required a big team of experts. AI is automating a lot of this, which brings the costs of building a product further down.

Today, thanks to technology, anyone can build any software for the cost of a dinner for two. What’s even more critical, because of that, those software products can be personalised on the individual level, unlocking a type of product-market fit that was not possible before.

This raises two really important questions:

1\. In a world of software abundance, what will be a durable competitive advantage for health tech companies?

2\. In a world where anyone can build exactly the software that they need, essentially for free, why would they buy anybody else’s software?

My gut feeling is that the answer to the first question has to do with humans and trust. If the competition on the market is no longer about who creates the best product - because with AI anyone can - then what’s left is conformity and adoption: who do I want to trust this with and why?

We can already see the second question being half answered by hospitals increasingly developing [their own apps](https://marginsofcare.com/charites-launches-cle-research-hospitals-the-cosmos-data-moat/), enabled by AI and powered by the [proprietary data they own](https://marginsofcare.com/the-atomic-unit-of-the-hospital-alpha-vs-beta-workflows-post-training-pipelines/) (and don’t want to share). Platform companies like [Corti](https://marginsofcare.com/corti-api-and-agentic-platforms/), [Microsoft](https://marginsofcare.com/multi-model-agents-harness-as-a-platform-haap-microsoft-autopilot/) and [Palantir](https://marginsofcare.com/the-atomic-unit-of-the-hospital-alpha-vs-beta-workflows-post-training-pipelines/) are empowering this trend and are thus well positioned to capture the value created. The situation looks less rosy for [third party apps](https://marginsofcare.com/health-tech-structural-shifts-winners-and-losers/).

Is this the end of the health tech market as we know it?