About $600 of LLM credits. This includes one month of $200/mo Claude Code, about 8 months of having two $20/mo subscriptions (between ChatGPT, Claude, Replit, Zencoder), and API calls to generate data. ⚙️ there is a difference between "LLMs to write code" and "code that uses LLMs to generate data". although they do blur together.
Other costs include:
- $99/year to be an Apple Developer
- $10/year for a domain name
- $30/month for web hosting on Digital Ocean.
Of course, the largest expense remains my own time 💡 None of the coding tools are good enough to do a project longer than about 2000 lines of code without expert supervision. Yet.. My time is not metered, and thus is somewhat invisible. But, at the low end, I would probably quote Fifty Thousand Dollars to do a similar project for someone else as paid work.
Compared to what it would take to build a similar app 5 years ago, this is fairly inexpensive. However, it is still a barrier to entry substantial enough to explain why there has not been a 🔥 more substantial flood of apps into the App Store.