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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

If I were a bit more bloody-minded I would launch a service for vibe-coded apps that, under the hood, did everything "the right way" and just charged a flat fee + percent on the underlying.

I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a leaky abstraction.

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I think a lot of people have built those services. But doing it right is more expensive, and people end up choosing the $5-$10/mo option over your $30/mo+ that does it right. Multiply those numbers by whatever multiple you want for higher end stuff.

And the LLM say: "You're absolutely right! We didn't need jaggederest's service. We can build it easily."

Well, one of the things I would be very, very focused on is LLM optimization, so that is something that could be mitigated, at least. Especially since I would be building with it, certainly, I would try to engineer it so that it was to Mr. Claude / Mr. Gippity's taste

1. There is no single "the right way", different app have different "right ways" 2. As for the flat fee, it only works initially when things are simple, as time goes on and your business and usecases you support grows, a flat fee won't work anymore.

I mean I would be limiting it to a very specific use case, and the flat fee would be "plus a percentage of the underlying", something like $50/mo + 20% of the AWS spend underlying.

And for that, with a simplified use case, well, they can scale up to $20k+ a month if they like, that would be ideal, and if they need a more complicated setup or enterpriseyness, migrate off with my blessing and available-not-required hands on support (again for a reasonable fee, maybe $10k if you want the white glove).

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