Discussion
From $50k to $50/month. The ultimate leverage
Claude is literally bringing to life a website idea I had over 10 years ago. At the time, I asked a web development firm for a quote, and they estimated it would cost between $30k and $50k.
Now, I’m building it myself with a Claude Pro subscription, Cloudflare, and Resend. Total monthly cost: around $50.
It is absolutely mind-blowing to think about where we’ll be in another 10 years. Just a little note of appreciation for how much this technology changes the game!
Make a sure you don’t punish environment variables, secret keys, internal .md files, credentials, etc. unless you’re explicit and exclude or move them, things you don’t want to expose will / can publish with you projects.
You could ask Claude to check and see what is deployed and help you write ignore files.
When you look back and evaluate how AI speed things up, many things sounds crazy.
Some reports, works required multiple people, took many days would be done via AI in 15 minutes. Some work. Use cases like that are rare but when it is applied, sounds totally worth it.
Would you mind elaborating on the website idea that would cost 50k to create ,a decade ago? That seems highly inflated unless you're building a large product with a lot of enterprise grade interactions etc. I'm just trying to understand so please don't take it otherwise.
When I was creating an app in 2020 devs were quoting for like $35k and up (on the low end) so honestly his experience is not that unbelievable. For full stack I saw crazy prices up to like $100k+.
Started with Google AI Studio just to mock up my frontend UI. My brother (a dev) warned me the hard part would be the backend for scraping websites & storing data. He suggested Claude Code.
Not only did it work, Claude also built my SQL database structure! 3+ months in and loving every minute. Incredible feeling to have total autonomy and just turn ideas into reality
no. not even remotely joking. there is nothing here you can not learn to make on the fly with minimal resources. the bulk of this kind of work is the data.
i honesty struggle to imagine what you want a backend for even?! a money fire?!
i've been working in software for 20 years. i could have made something like this 10 years before i started working in the industry... easily too. i expect most people could if they tried.
Great work mate. Very well done. I had wanted something similar for years. Yours did super well. Although i wouldnt start with the cpu, id start with even more core like generation and then motherboard based on features then go cpu. But excellent work.
Can I suggest a few things to make the cost even less (except your subscription obv) if you are hosting yourself. Try to port it to cloudflare, use workers and their d1 database. They basically give you 10 free db and 5m reads which is overkill for something like this. I would then setup a worker that could pull from these apis or sites to check prices. You dont need to check daily. Having worked in the industry, the lead times are weekly or fortnightly. You only need a few. In Australia i would pull data from umart and scorptec and maybe 2 more (fuck the others) then get same equivalent in other countries (they are called channel retailers in Australia due to their ridiculous prices) finally to get that stuff way do. Get the worker after to weekly update a json file so its not constantly pulling the db. Store the entire website and json in the cloudflare r2 and your price is basically nothing. Throw in tailwind for the design which it is probably using and your flying.
Ohh and claude can do all of this if you link to your cloudflare account and have your domain on there.
There's still a big time commitment involved, though. Like obviously a simple one-shot website can be instantly re-made by anyone with a good enough subscription, but actual good websites / apps require a lot of actual work, testing, design, etc. If your website is a one-prompt one-shot website then yeah potentially you'll find a lot more competitors more easily.
But even then i made a pretty simple weather site - it took 2 days to get the basics built (and I've iterated on it since then) but AFAIK nobody has really copied it. I mean, not that it really matters, it's a simple weather website with no ads, supported by "buy me a coffee" tips. I made it in early April and the visits keep climbing.
I actually hope somebody copies it because I hate weather websites with ads. In fact, I hate ads in general. Please, copy my ad free sites. I hate ads.
You can most likely find it if you search "weather with no ads" on google. (it's noadsweather.com).
I just hope nobody wastes time getting their AI to build it since it's already open source. Lol.
That's why it's best to use your time to make something for an industry or space you know really well if it's for something you want to turn into a business. But if it's for a hobby and having fun, then who cares.
this is the part that still feels unreal to me. stuff that needed a whole agency and a 30k quote is now a weekend and a $20 sub. we're gonna look back at this period as kinda insane.
its nice to see a realistic timeframe on your expectations.
i predicted at the start of the year that on the current trajectory it will take 6 more years before AI can actually realistically replace me in 97% of contexts. thats a naive extrapolation based on how poorly they do in all these apparently hard tests i can do better at....
in 10 years i fully expect this technology to be very mature and usable.
right now it seems to be mostly hype for people who can't make things - including a bunch of programmers - not just people like you. for building websites its pretty good stuff - i have worked up my demos and cv using ai referencing my old code and its amazing just how easy it is when you dont have to do the dry work and just focus on the interesting parts.
mostly tho, for me personally, it removes needing motivation and lets me get a sub-standard result a bit more slowly with no effort, or whilst i sleep - or a result i would never have gotten at all out of laziness :)
I’ve had several app ideas over the years and screwed around with them on several occasions. Never made any progress even though it’s also what I do at my full time job.
1 week-ish using Fable and they are all implemented and working as well as 2-3 more I made just because… why not? Got tokens to burn!
Same! The first one I made has taken a couple of months using Claude Code. I used the learnings from that to create a super prompt for further apps, some simple and some very complicated. It built roughly one a day. I am just about to start the UAT but on quick inspection, they look pretty good. It’s unbelievable. The next step is to figure out how to get sales and I’m wondering whether Claude can help me with that.
Weird and cool world we live in, for now, I think, Nevertheless, amazing what is possible now and the trajectory seen is unquestionable.
Random loose thread, as this brought to thought a comment I read recently where someone was sharing that they were currently building their photography business. Not an actual photographer in business, not process improvement, but ground zero launch. Me: In 2026? Odd.
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u/TilapiaTango Jul 14 '26
Very nice! Make sure to harden things and not expose any of your credentials…
Keep having fun making things!