Today I was incredibly productive, really in the zone from morning all the way until now, and I still have about 1–2 hours left before I go to sleep. But W-T-F, every 2 hours I managed to use up all my tokens, and I ended up getting charged around USD 60 each time, which adds up to about 360 for the entire day.
I’m juggling 3–4 apps at the same time, and I’m genuinely happy with the progress and the results I achieved today. Still, it honestly hurts to see those costs pile up like that, even though I’m satisfied with how much I got done.
I will try with only HIGH level tomorrow to see if the price will be the same…
@realfunnyeric If this is the new reality, building FX3 apps for clients 24 days a month would cost me about 300 daily × 24 = 7,200 per month just for Replit. I also want to earn as much as Replit, but I’m not sure I will
PS: I planned to use Replit exclusively for all my clients’ app and website projects, but no matter how how I calculate it, it doesn’t work out, guys.
Your usage today is likely not typical. App kickoff and foundational construction are always expensive, but you ultimately end up in an iterative state that is exponentially less expensive, as you refine the working app.
What are you charging for your apps? That may need to be revisited. AI is expensive, unfortunately.
@realfunnyeric You’re right, I haven’t reached that level of daily spending yet.
I also need to reassess my pricing. As I see it, using AI will cost around $2,000 per project, with my own work adding another $2,000. This quickly brings me into conflict with customers’ expectations of website or app costs. To earn a monthly salary of about $5,000 and cover Replit expenses, which I estimate at another $5,000, I’d need to secure $10,000 in projects each month. Given the high competition, that’s not going to be easy.
Just a suggestion, why don’t you get your clients to open a Replit account. Build on their account. They foot the Replit costs and you just charge an hourly / daily rate.
They would probably even feel more comfortable on you working in their account.
I’d charge £300 per hour minimum.
People will pay it. Especially for bespoke Apps that do exactly what they want, and nothing more.
That way it’s also full transparency, as they may think because you’re using AI your costs are ridiculously low.
Your hourly rate, is your rate. They’re either okay with it, or they’re not.
To be 100% honest, I don’t know if I’m just lucky, or building different types of Apps, but I’m not getting hammered as much as other people seem to be.
Don’t get me wrong. Prices have 100% increased. Those small .12c tasks seem long gone unless you’re just changing text or something.
But even so, I’m averaging $60 - $100 per website build. And probably $200 - $500 for business software.
And I’ve created some very complex software, like ERP systems.
As I say, 100% prices have gone up.
Maybe the stuff I build, even though complex in design, isn’t complex in a coding capacity?
@ablumson Let’s see how it goes in the future. I’ve built about seven projects on Replit (before using Bubble, Webflow, and WordPress). Four are multi-page SSR apps, SEO-optimized and localized, so they’re fairly large. My main point is that I’m not used to paying this much for software.
