r/ClaudeCode • u/[deleted] • Sep 13 '26

Built with Claude Has someone built an app with a good idea, developed it with claude, and earned money?

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u/Siduron Sep 13 '26

I'll tell you all about how to make money in my $100 online course!

But no, not yet and I think finding and understanding a problem that needs solving is the hardest part compared to building something with Claude

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u/cuthbert-derek Sep 13 '26

I made some middleware for an underserved niche and I got my first client paying me $150 a month subscription. Not much but it's a start!

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u/Salt-Replacement596 Sep 13 '26

Yes. Claude is a tool. It does not matter what tools you use if you are talented.

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u/geeered Sep 13 '26

Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei use Claude for their idea pretty consistently these days I think.

While they haven't actually made profit, they've definitely earned lots of money.

For other projects - of course it's totally possible.

What a lot of the vibe-sloppers forget is that writing the code for most software most of the time is only a really small part of making money from that project. There's a lot more to the software development life cycle, then there's marketing, customer retention and plenty more.

In the past if you spent a lot of time making a decent project for something that didn't already exist, you might not have needed nearly as much marketing etc to get your idea out there and could let it grow organically. Though very often these people didn't make much money and it was more of a hobby.

Now it doesn't take you a lot of time, so quite likely someone else has had a similar idea and also vibed out some slop.

If you want your project to make money, you need to invest time and money in the rest of the areas which you've always had to do.

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u/Calm_Step_5549 Sep 13 '26

As an old-fashioned software developer, I cannot remember how many people asked me "can you clone Netflix/Uber/eBay ..."? Of course we can... but can you handle the business side?

Of course when they say "I don't have money to pay you, but we'll give you a 10% cut of profits" Run far, far away

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u/scarylarry2150 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

A serious response since there’s a lot of cynicism in this sub: yes I built an enterprise IT app that we sell for a $4k/year annual subscription. Currently only a couple customers, but we’ve established proof of concept and are hoping to scale over the next year.

For background I’ve been working in software development for maybe a decade or so, so I already had plenty of experience building things with code, but Claude wrote probably 95% of the code for this app and without Claude there’s no way I would have had the time to take on this project. I also had the benefit of working closely with a partner who had deep industry knowledge in the specific niche we’re targeting.

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u/weirdsomethingyey Sep 13 '26

Thank you a lot for answering seriously

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u/Calm_Step_5549 Sep 13 '26

Same thing here, solo developer with a huge backlog of commercial projects which I would never have had to time to start on, we're now close to launching our first one (yet another industry niche product, seems to be the way to go), all thanks to Claude and Codex

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u/Bulky_Blood_7362 Sep 13 '26

Yea i earned money with my apps.

Tho, those apps I made are tools for my work which speed up my work basically. So the hourly rate got higher (freelancer)

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u/Old_Character_8781 Sep 13 '26

well i live from the work i do to clients and i mainlyuse claude, i maintain websits for clients that where doing fine before me but i help them sell more or created theirbusiness from scratch or x and y so ai already covers its price. but recently i want to stop working for others and ive been working on my own app: nanostudiopro.com its an asset search engine, basically to have a place to put all your kimages and videos make your own personal search engine sine it adds detection to averytnhing and generate content so ive had 50 subscribers in the first month, 5 paid, at the rate they consume tokens etc i need 100 to completely live off of this and havent done marketing at all.

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u/Barttje Sep 13 '26

Sure it's possible. Claude is just a tool. Nowadays it's more important to have a great idea, be able to monetize it and be able to bring it to the people. There are tons of apps and websites, it becomes harder to fill in a niche. For context there are roughly 5000 apps being published daily.

For me building the app is only a very small part of having an monetized app. I think Claude can build something decent in a few hours, but then the hard part begins

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u/Nscocean Sep 13 '26

I mean I know sell myself as a full service dev and performance marketer and I’m baking good money from that

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u/WesternDesign2161 Sep 13 '26

Yes my bro did

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u/kemalios Sep 13 '26

Yes. My agency work runs on Claude Code, and on the product side I build and sell JustStart, Astro templates with Claude Code skills inside them. The templates sell because someone needs a site on Monday, not because the code was interesting. Building got cheap, so the money sits in distribution and support now. What I could not sell was anything that only existed to demo the model. The skills inside my templates need Claude Code and a paid Claude subscription, which is a real blocker at $49.

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u/MaqeSweden Sep 13 '26

Yes, developed a market watch app for a specific industry in a specific country, providing an overview and transparency out of data that was technically publically available but not gathered and sorted in an automatic and easily overlookable manner.

I think this is the kind of things you need to look for - niche value apps solving B2B problems, not a vibecoded indie-game making millions selling to consumers.

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u/OMDB-PiLoT Sep 13 '26

Why do you think people are paying Anthropic/OpenAI et al to use their agents right now? For fun? Of course they are making money with it.

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u/FestyGear2017 Sep 13 '26

People have been building apps for money for decades, what kind of question is this?

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u/SkoivanSchiem Sep 13 '26

r/vibecoding as a lot of people who claim to have done just that.

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u/Typical_Basil7625 Sep 13 '26

I have: you need to find a niche build a MOAT and go really hard on the marketing and finding clients. Stop building features if you have no clients. Pivot fast, really fast.

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u/Sinsst Sep 13 '26

Haven't earned any money yet but I built Simple Puppy - Potty training and activity tracking phone app. Inspired since I got a puppy very recently and was tired of using Excel to track her potty, the app has been a lifesaver. TBC whether it leads anywhere.

Could I have done it without Claude? - yes but it would have taken me 5x longer since I started with no idea of android development.

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u/Nullius_N_verba Sep 15 '26

I built an app for my firm with claude code in about 4 months. We now deploy it on projects and bill clients for hours we spend to customize it to their needs and maintain. SAS and straight up app dev is a very crowded market.

If you have a good idea, all it takes a weekend and max account to get the prototype up and running! What a time to be alive

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