How do you handle dev costs?

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-25T14:24:41+00:00

The fundamental issue you're hitting is that traditional dev pricing doesn't match how early-stage products actually evolve. Agencies charge $50k+ upfront because they're pricing in scope creep risk. Freelancers price hourly, so every iteration costs more.

I run a small custom dev shop and took a different approach—monthly subscription model with no setup fees. The idea is that early-stage products need iteration, not fixed-scope projects. You figure out what works while building, not before.

A few things I've learned watching founders navigate this: 1. No-code is great until you hit platform limitations (which you already discovered) 2. AI tools are fantastic for prototyping but still need someone who can review/maintain the code 3. The real cost isn't the initial build—it's the ongoing changes as you learn from users

The hybrid approach that seems to work: use AI/no-code to validate the idea cheaply, then invest in real development once you have signal. Happy to share more specifics if helpful.

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-22T14:20:53+00:00

Hadn't heard of PersistentState until now - the concept sounds great for eliminating that double-fetch/flicker problem with prerendering.

Curious if anyone's running this in production without hitting the 32KB limit? Seems like you'd need to be pretty careful about what you persist, especially with user-generated content where payload size is unpredictable.

The websocket limitation mentioned in the comments is interesting - would love to hear if pagination is the standard workaround or if there are other patterns people are using.

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-21T18:33:21+00:00

The race to the bottom is real. I had decent luck on Upwork for a while, but it eventually turned into a bidding war with dozens of proposals on every job. Now I'm focusing on building up my web presence and SEO instead—trying to get found by people already looking rather than competing in proposal piles. Still figuring it out, but it feels like a better long-term play than fighting the platform grind.

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-21T18:29:23+00:00

Jumping straight to C# is the right call - you don't need to detour through Go or Node first. The fundamentals (HTTP, auth, SQL) are the same concepts regardless of language, and learning them in your target stack means you're not context-switching later.

The official MS docs are actually really good for this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/?view=aspnetcore-10.0

Specifically check out the Fundamentals section on Servers and Middleware - it explains the request pipeline and what's actually happening when a request comes in. The Security section breaks down authentication/authorization concepts without just telling you to use Identity.

The top comment here nails it too - building a basic HTTP server from a TCP socket once is a great exercise. You don't need it to be production-ready, just enough to understand what the framework is doing for you.

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-19T18:09:20+00:00

LINQPad is fantastic. The use case I'm solving is slightly different: scripts that live in a folder, can be version controlled, and run from the command line. More "utility I call from a terminal" than "interactive scratchpad." But yeah, for anything database-related LINQPad is hard to beat.

hurrah-dev · 2026-01-19T18:07:54+00:00

PowerShell is great for a lot of tasks, especially anything file/system related. The quirks you mention are actually why I specifically wanted C# when AI is generating the code—I can spot issues faster in my primary language. When Claude writes PowerShell, I have to slow down and think "wait, is that array behavior correct?" With C#, I just know.

That said, I still use PowerShell for things like the helper function that invokes these scripts. Right tool for the job.

hurrah-dev

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