What it really costs

Money is not what stops people here. 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 line you cannot pay in money

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

Do the division. Six hours a week is a serious commitment for someone with school or a job, and 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.

If you cannot code yet, add the learning on top, and be honest that learning to build and ship a working web app is itself a multi-month project. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to stop calling it a side hustle.

Why there are no vendor prices on this page

Every course that tells you a host costs a specific amount a month is writing a number that expires. Free tiers get smaller, plans get renamed, currencies move. We would rather tell you the shape of the bill and let you check the figure yourself on the day it matters.

So the rule for your own budget: 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 takes a minute and it 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 above 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.

What is worth paying for, and when

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

Notice that none of those steps is at the beginning. The first weeks of this cost nothing, which is exactly why there is no excuse to skip the part where you find out whether the problem is real.