{"channel":"trakaido","content":" <<< 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.) >>>\r\n\r\nOther costs include:\r\n* $99/year to be an Apple Developer\r\n* $10/year for a domain name\r\n* $30/month for web hosting on Digital Ocean.\r\n\r\n----\r\n\r\nOf 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.\r\n\r\nCompared 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.","created_at":"2026-04-03T15:16:01.703916","id":781,"llm_annotations":{},"parent_id":null,"processed_content":"

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. \u2699\ufe0f there is a difference between \"LLMs to write code\" and \"code that uses LLMs to generate data\". although they do blur together.

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Other costs include:\r

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  • $99/year to be an Apple Developer\r
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  • $10/year for a domain name\r
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  • $30/month for web hosting on Digital Ocean.\r
    • \n
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Of course, the largest expense remains my own time \ud83d\udca1 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.\r

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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 \ud83d\udd25 more substantial flood of apps into the App Store.

","quotes":[],"subject":"how much did building Trakaido cost?"}