Launch HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let users build features on top of your product

Here we go again: another YC company "discovering" that enterprise customers have bespoke needs. Vendo's pitch (https://github.com/runvendo/vendo) is simple — let users describe a dashboard, workflow, or mini-app, and the magic LLM box builds it on top of your existing data and API. Never mind that the open source ecosystem has had answer for this since the dawn of plugins: if you want users to build on your platform, ship an API, document it, and get out of the way. Vendo is the venture-backed version of that, wrapped in a chatbot. The deeper problem is ownership. Vendo is a closed, hosted service bolted onto your closed SaaS. If Vendo hits a rough patch — and YC companies do — every custom feature your users "built" evaporates. There's no fork, no export path, no community to pick up the pieces. The open source model at least guarantees your extensions live as long as your code does. With this, you're renting your customization from a third party you've never met. That's not extensibility; that's a dependency with a bow on it. And let's talk about the irony: the founders are essentially building a meta-SaaS that generates features for other SaaS products. They're monetizing the fact that most SaaS vendors are too lazy to build proper plugin ecosystems. If Vendo gets real traction, the smart move for every incumbent isn't to adopt it — it's to build a plugin marketplace, buy Vendo, or just add a prompt-to-feature button natively and cut out the middleman. The LLM wrapper is the easy part; distribution is everything. To be fair, there's something here. The "citizen developer" dream keeps dying and resurrecting, and LLMs might finally make it stick. Letting non-technical users stub out a quick custom report without opening a support ticket is genuinely useful. But the open source lesson remains: people don't want to build features on a platform they can't see, audit, or escape. Vendo might be a nice stopgap, but the moment a customer asks "can I see the code it generated?" the answer better be yes — with a license that lets them take it somewhere else. Verdict: worth watching, neat demo,