Founders

Getting a high quality app to the App Store probably costs no less than $100,000.

This includes paying yourself, fees, incorporation, taxes, some cloud services.

If you’re not technical, but have a strong technical cofounder, I would imagine it’s no more than $200,000.

Sweet spot is three people, split duties.

What are your learnings on the app side?

I vibed a POC with swift last weekend and it just worked. Crazy compared to the react native experience

Tried the same model (GPT-CODEX-HIGH) on both tasks.

Swift -> it one shot the whole thing from zip.

React native. Couldn’t get the https://rn.new/ NativeWindUI template up even (AI guided, I didn’t code)

And the ARKit functionality in Swift was pure fire as it was a room measuring MVP

For AppStore/Prod I’d start over again and rewrite in ARKit and ignore android at first.
Though react native also has access to these underlying libraries.

Besides learning whats the business benefit to from scratch?



Most apps will fail because the founders haven’t been asked to build things from scratch.

Speedrunning React Native is ngmi. Speedrunning SwiftUI ngmi (we’re doing more UIKit every single day, and we are venturing into Metal soon).

Not including performance backends.

Sure you can get an MVP to market and validate some thesis.

That ain’t a business. Businesses serve customers. They put the hamburger meat in between sesame buns.

And when the market gets tough, they lower prices. 

React Native Developer. Building the next generation of mobile wallets at @boostxyz.

We could have been in the App Store within 6 months last year with our RN build, but it would have been very janky and not ready for user growth.

So somewhere between 8 months to a year to get out something that is reliably read/write and doesn’t need CPR everyday.

curious about the timeline assumption behind that number

Yeah bandwidth and data. Everything else is pretty trivial. Managed Postgres is very, very expensive.

Which of these eats up the fund most? Your infra would probably vary drastically based on traffic/volume right.?

it's actually amazing how cheaply you can deploy a miniapp to farcaster

one of the main benefits imo, how cheap & quickly you can deploy stuff

and also not having someone to rug your app if it doesn't follow random rules that can change every day....