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Part 1 · Is this real? · Lesson 2 of 13

What it really costs

The money is small and the time is not. A real line-item budget, why we refuse to print other companies' prices, and what you give up by choosing this.

8 cards · 4 min

Money is not the blocker

You can get a working product in front of a paying customer for less than the cost of a pair of shoes. What stops people is that the bill is paid in months.

The real line items

Domain name
One bill a year
Hosting and database
Free tier first, then monthly
Payment processing
A cut of every charge
Transactional email
Free tier first, then monthly
Error tracking and logs
Free tier first, then monthly
Editor and coding assistant
Free, or monthly if you upgrade
Cash out of pocket before your first customer
$0-300
Your evenings, months one to six
150-400 hours
What you give up
Every faster option on Learn

We name cost categories instead of other companies' prices. A monthly fee typed onto this page today is wrong within a year, and a stale figure is a lie with a date on it. Look each one up the day you sign up and write it in your own budget. Page checked 2026-08-31.

The hours are the price

Between 150 and 400 hours is our honest read on a first shippable version for someone who can already code, including the parts nobody counts: deployment, payments, the password reset flow, the eight evenings lost to one bug.

If you cannot code yet, add the learning on top. That is not a reason to avoid this. It is a reason to stop calling it a side hustle.

Do the division

Six hours a week is a serious commitment for someone with school or a job. Six hours a week against 250 hours is about ten months. Fifteen hours a week gets you there in four. Neither of those is a weekend, and both assume you do not stop.

Why no vendor prices

Free tiers shrink, plans get renamed, currencies move. Any figure printed here expires.

So when you create an account, open the pricing page, write the number and the date in your notes, and set a reminder to look again in six months. That habit is the difference between a budget and a guess.

The cost nobody counts

Six months spent here are six months not spent on anything faster. That is the real price tag, and it is bigger than every line in the table combined.

If you need money soon, the correct move is not to build this faster. It is to earn with something that pays in weeks and build this in the evenings with the pressure off. A product built by someone who needs rent from it in eight weeks gets shipped badly and priced desperately.

Buy nothing yet

What to pay for, when

  1. Nothing until you have a written problem statement and five conversations with people who have that problem.
  2. A domain, once you have something to point it at that a real person will look at this week.
  3. A paid hosting tier, once a free tier limit is actually blocking you - not when you imagine it might.
  4. A paid tool, once you can name the hours a week it gives back. Write them down before you buy, then check in a month.
  5. Anything at all, once a customer is paying you.

Do this next

Open a calendar and block the hours you will genuinely work on this for the next twelve weeks. Add them up. Write the total at the top of your notes file - that number, not your enthusiasm, is your budget.

Next lesson: Why most builds stallSee the whole path