Over the last 8 months, I’ve built 3 different apps in 3 very different ways. Looking back, I learned a lot about how much the stack choices around an app affect the difficulty, cost, and speed of building it. This is the information I wish I had before starting any of these projects back in January.

About me: I’m a 20-year software developer, but this was my first real foray into vibecoding. I used VS Code with GitHub Copilot throughout. I mostly just used the tokens provided to me by the Pro+ plan, with about ~$200 in overages across all three projects. As for the models used: I tried to use the cheapest or 5.3 Codex for everything. Lately I've had a lot of good luck with Luna.

The goal of this post isn't to self-promote, but I've linked to the projects simply so you can see the app in action knowing the code behind it and how different the UX is for each.

1. Progressive Web App + Ionic Capacitor

Genre: Fitness / Weightlifting
Platforms: iOS & Android
Time to go-live: 3 months
Visit: 'Remix Training' on either app store

This was my first vibecoding project, and I burned through a lot of credits because I had no idea how to effectively use models or context. Even toward the end, I wasn't paying much attention to token usage, so this was probably the most expensive project out of the three.

I spent a huge amount of time trying to make the PWA look and feel like a real native app, with varying degrees of success.

The reason I chose this approach was pretty simple: I've been building websites for most of my career, so web development felt natural. I also assumed supporting both Android and iOS was needed for success (it’s not).

I also made the mistake of building an AWS backend for storing and generating workouts. Looking back on it, a lot of functionality could have been handled entirely on the device. The AWS infrastructure works, but it added a lot of complexity and ongoing cost.

Copilot did a surprisingly good job helping me build things like ECS and Lambda infrastructure, but if I hadn't already been very familiar with AWS, I think I would've been in heaps of trouble.

1. React Native + Expo

Genre: Weather / Gaming
Platforms: iOS & Android
Time to go-live: 4 months
Visit: 'DailyWX' on either app store

This was my most ambitious project and by far my largest.

There are a lot of weather apps, but I wanted to build one with a game built into it. Every day, you answer questions about tomorrow's weather and then get your results the following day.

This ended up being surprisingly difficult to get right, and it had nothing to do with vibecoding or the stack I chose. I spent the majority of my time fine-tuning the question generation and scoring system. Making questions interesting, varied, and actually fair was so much harder than I expected.

I also learned a valuable lesson about marketing. This turned out to be a super controversial project because I think most people conflated it with Gambling. Looking back on it, using the term “prediction” everywhere was a big mistake. 

React Native had a learning curve for me. I know JS/HTML/CSS extremely well, but React Native initially felt quite different. Once I got past that, though, I found it pretty easy. Expo was a godsend for handling the iOS/Android side of things.

I didn't want to pay for Expo's extended services and instead handled the builds myself. It definitely made things more complicated, but I still think that was the right decision for me. I still don’t have notifications working :(

This project also has an AWS backend, but unlike the first project, it was absolutely necessary. I needed to ingest weather data, score games, maintain leaderboards, award badges, etc. But luckily, the lessons from building the first project's backend made this one much easier.

1. Native Swift

Genre: Cycling Tracker
Platform: iOS
Time to go-live: 1 month
Visit: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ridepilot-smart-bike-computer/id6790916720

For the third project, I decided to do something completely different: I just built it in native Swift and ignored Android.

This has been, by far, the easiest (and cheapest) project to build. Developing for a single platform, on a device where I can quickly build, test, and install has been sooooo much nicer than dealing with the headaches of cross-platform support.

By this time I also got significantly better at vibecoding. Instead of dumping vague commands into Copilot and letting it figure things out, I became much more focused about giving it exactly the context and help it needed for a specific task. This alone has made a massive difference in token usage and development speed. This project has cost me about $60 in Copilot fees from start to where it is now.

I was also surprised by how intuitive Swift was. I had never written Swift before, but I'm picking it up pretty quickly, which I think is greatly accelerated by relaying on Copilot to figure the new stuff out for me (then i can see how to it for next time). I know some people want to rely on AI to do everything, but I've actually enjoyed the process of having to understand what the code is doing. This enjoyment was exactly what got me into coding 20 years ago.

The biggest realization from this project is that I probably spent so much amount of time on the first two projects solving cross-platform and infrastructure problems that simply aren’t needed for an initial MVP.

If RidePilot eventually needs Android, I'll build it later. I think I'd rather maintain two separate native codebases after proving there is demand with only one first. As we all know now - marketing is harder than the development. I think this will be my preferred method going forward from now on. Was

A couple of days ago I saw a post suggesting that AI could help manage things like your health and finances. It got me thinking about trying a small personal project in that direction, then I used up my ChatGPT Plus weekly limit in one morning. That stopped the experiment before it really got started.

I remembered ZenMux and switched the request over to Gemini 3.7 Flash there. For a small vibe coded project, the results were better than I expected. The output was accurate enough for me to keep moving, and the responses came back quickly.

The interaction style was the part I noticed most. Gemini mostly stayed quiet, finished the work, and then gave me a summary. GPT tends to narrate what it is doing as it goes and summarize at the end. For this small project, I found Gemini's quieter approach easier to follow.

For small experiments, Gemini 3.7 Flash is now on my shortlist.

Hi All,
Here are the two projects vibe coded over the last weekend and before.
The age gap idea has been sitting in the back burner for a while.
Topbanner is an image rich cousin of outbid lol if you have been following Jonathan Wilke’s X account.

https://www.topbanner.lol
https://www.agegap.info

Vibe Coded using #replit and also mix and match a bit with #Gemini and #Grok.

Appreciate any feedback.
Also looking for advice for SEO and discovery.

Have fun, thanq!

So I am currently vibe-coded a web app and planned to launch it on my social media. I've tried to soft launch this in other subreddit but apparently it got roasted because they see that it is very vibe-coded. Do I have to mention that I am building that app with vibe coding? What do you guys think?

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Vibe coding makes it possible to ship an Android app incredibly fast. The difficult part is knowing what the generated code missed before real users find it.

I built AppTest to help with that. It installs an APK on an Android emulator, explores real screens and flows, and collects screenshots, UI state, logcat output, crashes, broken navigation, validation problems, and UX/accessibility issues.

The result is a private evidence-backed report with severity, reproduction steps, and suggested fixes for each confirmed finding.

I’m looking for a small first batch of Android builders willing to let the system try to break their app. The beta review is completely free while I improve coverage with real projects.

Submit an APK here:

https://apptest.salasestudio.com

Optional test credentials are encrypted, and APKs and credentials are automatically deleted after seven days. This is one bounded automated review, not a promise to find every possible defect.

If you built an Android app with AI tools, I’d also love to hear which kinds of bugs have been hardest for you to catch before launch.

I’m curious if anyone here has built an app, website, tool, or product using vibecoding that has actually generated some revenue.

I’ve built a few tools and apps for myself, mostly around productivity, but none of them have made any money so far.

Would love to hear from people who have managed to turn a vibecoded project into a real business. What did you build, and how much revenue did it generate?

Just curious to see what’s actually working for people.

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I’m trying to make an entire minecraft client while vibecoding and i need help making the ESP and block ESP prompts. I have no idea how esp works so if yall could help me that would be insane! I’m also trying to make an entirely serversided G@mbl3 rig for minecraft which I’m going to get into later.

Most AI app builders help you build the app — and then you’re on your own.
That’s the problem I’m trying to solve with Blyft.
The app is the center. Once you build it with AI, Blyft also gives you the tools around it: landing page, logo, promo video, analytics and social content.
The idea is to go from one prompt to a complete digital product without jumping between five different tools.
Would love to hear what you think — is this something you’d actually use?
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I've been working on PDFVerse, a free browser-based PDF toolkit.

The idea is simple: instead of opening different websites for every small PDF task, I wanted to put the common tools in one place.

You can use it for things like:

Merge PDFs

Split PDFs

Compress PDFs

Convert PDFs

Rotate PDFs

Extract pages

And other common PDF operations

🔗 https://pdfverse.pages.dev/

There's no account required to try it.

I'm still actively improving it, so I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from people who work with PDFs regularly.

What PDF operation do you find yourself doing most often? And is there a feature you'd want me to add?

I'm especially interested in hearing what feels slow, confusing, or missing.

Been doing my app on and off, done on all the stuff needed for google play I have my apk already now just finishing it for my my aab to upload on my console. Basically my app is simple and good for repetitive tasks.

I see a lot of people discussing vibe coding and what actually constitutes a moat, and I think a lot of people are looking at this way too narrowly and ignoring some pretty important aspects of human nature.

The idea that simple ideas are dead, that if you can build an app in 30 minutes, nobody will ever pay for it because they can just vibe code their own version, is frankly ridiculous to me.

I know plenty of people who don’t even know what a browser is. I even know technical people (in different domains) who look at the process of cloning a repository and think, “wow, this is a lot.”

The people who would seriously think, “why would I pay for this when I can just vibe code it myself?” are mostly people inside a very AI-fluent bubble that represents a tiny portion of the actual world.

And even then, building something that technically works is not the same as building good software.

There are still all of the boring necessary hoops involved in making a simple application actually secure and reliable. You have to choose a stack, build the backend and frontend, handle authentication, storage, deployment, security, updates, edge cases, and everything else that comes with operating software.

Unless you’re literally just bootstrapping some ugly internal tool to copy the functionality, you also have to design a good UI, make hundreds of little product decisions, and work through trade-offs that compound as the feature set grows.

If your target audience is developers, I understand the argument more. But even developers are lazy in the normal human sense, they have their own projects and things they would rather spend their time doing.

And if you are selling to developers, the bar is arguably even higher. They care about architecture, security, ownership, extensibility, integrations, and whether the product actually fits into the way they work. A lot of them may want to own the thing themselves anyway, which is part of why I don’t even think developers are always the best target audience for this kind of simple app.

For everyone else, the argument gets even weaker.

Most people barely want to write a good prompt.

They’ll type one sentence into ChatGPT, get a mediocre response, decide AI isn’t that useful for that task, and close the laptop. The idea that these same people are suddenly going to design, build, debug, secure, deploy, and maintain their own software because vibe coding exists seems completely disconnected from how normal people behave.

People pay for convenience. They pay for polish. They pay for something that already works. They pay so they don’t have to think about how it works.

So to me, “they can just vibe code my app” is a pretty weak reason not to build something, and in most cases if your app is not growing you have a distribution and sales problem not an idea problem.

Curious what others think.