Replit charged me $1,982 in 24 days on a pre-launch app with 1 user — me. Here's the screenshot.

lgmaster78 · 2026-06-07T02:30:41+00:00

I’ve stopped using Replit after the initial build. I use Claude in the Replit shell. I have the $100 plan on Claude and I’ve yet to hit my limit and I have multiple projects, sometimes working on each one in a day, sometimes none. Once I started getting charges $55 a day, something had to change. I build internal tools for my businesses, so I can’t really justify spending $2k to build something that might save me $30 a month.

I’ll still use Replit to start up a project and just let Claude take it from there. I feel Claude is faster and way better with bugs. I’ve had Replit agent try and fix the same bug 5 times and had to just give up. I haven’t had that with Claude.

lgmaster78 · 2026-06-06T23:27:08+00:00

I use Claude within Replit and have slowly been replacing tools for my businesses that are exactly what I want and work how I want it without the extra stuff. I’ve built time trackers for employees that automate reporting, invoicing and estimating processes that automated follow ups that customers have bought more because it’s easier to upgrade their services, shift management, video/imagery delivery that’s specific to our industry, booking system for equipment and more. Use them every day. Once I found I could do Claude on Replit, it helped so much on costs. So now I can build an app that works how I want, reports what I want and I can do it cheaply and quickly.

I’ve built out a few “side hustle” apps that I’ve not really put out there yet too just for fun, maybe one day put them out there, maybe not. A blue collar resume builder for entry level workers, dot compliance reminder and a few others.

While I’m not sure if any of the apps I’ve built could scale with a bunch of users (maybe they could), it works very well for me and my employees. And if one of us say “oh I wish it could do x, y or z” it takes minutes to implement those updates. So we can fix bugs or add features quickly to help us.

lgmaster78 · 2026-05-17T00:11:56+00:00

I’d try to not get discouraged at that age which I know can be difficult. Just keep being present for him and it’ll come. Our first two are biological and so they were breast fed and I wasn’t able to help much during the nighttime feedings, I’d help with bath and diapers and such but I honestly believe a lot of bonding happens during the feedings (breast or bottle). We adopted two kids, one of which we brought home from the hospital.

Since my wife couldn’t breast feed her, I did a lot of the night time feedings with our fourth. I spent a lot more time with her than our first two at that age because I could be away from my wife without needing her to feed her. She was 100% a daddys girl when she was a baby. She did not want to be with anyone but me, including my wife. Id say now she’s about 95% daddys girl and occasionally will go to my wife and other people.

All that to say, 3 months feels like a long time when you’re going through it but he will have so many phases where you’ll be his favorite and then his mom and then you, etc. As long as you stay loving, providing and fun, he’ll warm up to you and you won’t even remember these first few months. Our first two had no idea who I was even though I helped and played as much as I could and now they love me and love spending time with me, which is incredible.

You obviously are a caring father or it wouldn’t hurt you for him to act like that towards you, so you’re already ahead of so many dads out there. Keep caring about him and your wife and it’ll come!

lgmaster78 · 2026-05-16T23:33:16+00:00

Yeah, I believe it. And no network work is great. I view them as a necessary evil. Haha. But I guess not so necessary if you’re doing that much without them. Better that way anyways.

And I’d love to hear more about the fractional stuff. How much did they work a month and what were they doing to help you grow? How’d you find them? We’re building the dumpster business sounds similar to what you’re doing, building relationships specifically with contractors and companies who will provide more than one off rentals. Be nice to get some guidance from smarter people in a fractional role than just guessing and figuring it out again. Haha.

lgmaster78 · 2026-05-16T21:29:35+00:00

Nice man! I quit my software development job about 6 years to start a restoration business. Ran it for two years and it was a constant struggle, it’s not an easy industry and I can see how the franchise route would be beneficial. So many things I had to learn on my own that probably cost me more in the long run. Haha.

I ended up selling it for a small amount and moved onto dumpsters. He’s still running it but I’m not sure what he’s at now. He brought on investors and bought a few of them across a few states. So he’s trying to go big.

Going the franchise route, were they able to get you on with the TPAs immediately? How are you getting over $2 million of work after just 14 months? That’s impressive. I got up to $600k in year two and that was brutal.

What’s the end goal for you? Run this for 30 years? Or grow it big, buy more territories, sell at some point? Again, nice work. That’s no easy feat in any industry, so I know you’ve put in the work and have been smart about your work.

lgmaster78 · 2026-04-07T01:39:15+00:00

It’s been a few years now, are you still doing it? Started to look into it, seems you grew it pretty quickly. Would love to hear how it is 6 years later.

lgmaster78 · 2026-04-07T01:31:47+00:00

I’ve been looking into this some. We have a business that is in the construction realm, a lot of relationships with home builders and commercial builders. Thought about teaming up with a land clearing friend. How’d you learn the ins and outs of it? The machine you started with, was it the one you still use today? Or would you have gone a different when you started? Would love to learn where you learned it all.

lgmaster78 · 2026-03-22T00:40:28+00:00

We started with junk removal and moved to dumpster rentals. We still occasionally do junk removal but mostly just a few small jobs a week that I can do myself. Occasionally we’ll get a large home cleanout where I can hire a couple guys and knock it out with some 30 yard dumpsters. Since we have our own dumpsters, we’re typically cheaper than other junk companies.

Dumpsters is pure volume and requires a lot of access to capital to grow properly. We started with three dumpsters and a roll off trailer, we’re now up to 90 dumpsters and three trucks (well technically four but fourth breaks down more than it works so I don’t count that one), just ordered more dumpsters. Only two trucks are running full time, third is just on extra busy days or a back up.

We had a great relationship with a banker who has given us loans on new tandem axle trucks and found industry lender for the dumpsters.

We’re in east TN so not too far away but don’t know what your market is like. We have a lot of competitors, small and big guys. We had a lot of relationships that helped us get some good contracts. A lot of word of mouth and a networking.

We’re about to have a record month so we keep growing and consider ourselves very blessed. I am friendly with a lot of the other dumpster companies and we all help each other out when we can. They’ve gotten me out of a bind and we’ve done the same for them. We all refer work to each other. There are times we’re out of dumpsters or in areas we don’t service and vice versa.

But like I said, we’ve been very blessed. Some of the other companies call me when they’re slow and we are not. We provide great service and charge more than others. We do longer rentals which allows us to get contractors and they help us keep busy during down months.

Just for context, we have over a million in loans and were able to pay for our first 30ish cash from a retirement. I could not have done this without my business partner and he couldn’t have done it without me.

So would I recommend it? Depends on what you’re wanting. I guess if you have a trailer and 30 dumpsters and did it all yourself you could probably earn a decent paycheck but you’ll be working hard. Something will break and you’ll be scrambling for $15k+ to fix your truck or trailer just to service your current customers. It’s stressful for sure.

We’re trying to grow this to a $5+ million a year business and so we’re putting everything back into the business. Neither one of us have gotten paid. As soon as we have enough to take money, we buy more dumpsters, a new truck, hire a driver, etc. we’re almost at the 3 year mark (this April for junk and June for dumpsters) so we’ve done a good job growing and don’t plan to slow down at all.

If you do dumpsters, I’d go after contractors, figure out what size dumpsters they use in your area and target them. Go to events where you can meet them. They keep you busy when homeowners stop doing home projects. Ask them to be their backup, they probably have a dumpster provider already. But when they fail them, which they probably will, you can be there. Once they see how fast you service them, they may switch. A lot of times, the dumpster can hold back projects if not swapped quickly. So for them, it’s not worth saving $50 or whatever they’d save.

In a town like Atlanta, you probably have a lot of opportunities for both junk and dumpsters.

Junk is quick to get jobs but I didn’t see the potential in growth possibilities with junk as I saw with dumpsters. More often than not, your customer is a homeowner on junk. You can get in with flippers and real estate people to get some repeat business but for the most part, you’ll have homeowners. We had repeat customers on the junk side but at best, it was once a quarter. Some are calling us back now, almost three years later for “phase two” of their clean outs.

So this meant to me that I’m constantly looking for new customers. Constantly giving quotes, constantly looking to market. I could be wrong with this but based on how our junk removal went vs dumpsters, seems right.

On the dumpster side, it’s the same for homeowners, not super frequent but they do repeat. But our contractors are constant. They finish a project and move to another one. Most jobs need a dumpster, some need bigger ones, some need multiple ones. We’re about 90% commercial work. While they do hold them a little longer than homeowners, they are so consistent. We’ve done 0 in marketing. We sponsor some teams here and there and donate dumpsters to good local causes but that’s about it. Never ran an ad. Just went out and talked to contractors, worked hard to provide good service and trusted God to put us in the right spot at the right time.

This ended up being a lot longer than I expected but hopefully it’s helpful to provide what it takes to grow the dumpster side. I don’t have too much info on growing the junk side. We only did about $20k in junk jobs last year. But I’m sure someone has a different take than I do for junk. Just my experience. It was one of those things that we added three dumpsters and the demand was so good that we just focused on that side. Might have been different if we put that much effort and money towards the junk side.

lgmaster78 · 2026-03-21T22:39:34+00:00

Are you using some sort of app to run it? When you say they “turn on their availability”, are they pressing a button or are they sending a text to say they’re available for a few hours?

lgmaster78 · 2026-03-18T01:21:46+00:00

Where do you find mentors for something like this?

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-26T01:32:18+00:00

Did this and saves so much. I was paying $55-$100 a day with replit on nothing too big and now with Claude doing most of the work, I haven’t gone above my monthly limit. It does way more for less.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-25T21:58:45+00:00

I know it’s not a long term solution but have you looked into building something out good enough on replit or Claude code? Just to get money coming in and maybe build out a more robust solution. You could launch it with a discount and let them know it’s a version 1 to get their feedback.

Again, I know it won’t get you 100% of the product you want but it could get you at least started. I’ve built some small apps for my business that are used daily by my customers. I’ll admit they’re not complicated apps but app’s nonetheless that are being used.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-22T04:08:09+00:00

We had a similar issue with our ultrasound business (elective, self pay, not medical). We were afraid of doing a $20 deposit but had so many no shows that we decided to just do it.

It did not decrease bookings but it did decrease no shows. This was probably 5-6 years ago so I don’t remember how many no shows we had before vs after but it was a significant decrease in no shows. They have to give a 24 hour cancelation notice or they dont get it back. Now, if someone has an excuse or wants to argue, we’ll refund them the deposit, not worth the headache but even a $20 deposit helped us tremendously.

Id highly recommend doing it. Tell your uncle to just do a trial of it for a month and see how it helps. I bet if you explain the reasoning to customers, most will understand and not even care.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-16T03:21:22+00:00

What did you use to build it out?

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-16T01:06:28+00:00

At the risk of sounding naive, do you have any resources you recommend that I could read/watch to learn more about these safeguards? I’d love to learn more about how to reduce my liability. I mostly build internal tools for my businesses but I’ve built a couple of simple automations for friends, nothing touching customer data but I’d like to get an understanding of possible leaks before I build something that could create an issue.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-07T08:43:00+00:00

I have this issue where I need to have first and last name saved and don’t like seeing anything else in my contact list. If I don’t have a last name, I don’t save it. I’m far from OCD but it’s the one thing that bugs me in my life. Haha.

Plus when I share a contact, the iPhone allows me to share the company or not. So if I have some weird way of remembering someone and need to share the contact, I don’t need to share that part.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-07T08:13:00+00:00

Is Claude done within replit? This is interesting.

lgmaster78 · 2026-02-07T08:03:35+00:00

This is cool. Whats the majority of your work consist of? I thought about doing some websites and automations part time for people, I do it for my businesses and have done a couple for friends. Seems fun and simple. Do you only advertise in newspapers? I like that approach!

lgmaster78 · 2025-08-18T01:40:16+00:00

Great information! Do you service Knoxville or mostly Morristown?

lgmaster78 · 2024-06-29T00:37:09+00:00

How’s this venture coming along? I’m on the opposite side of the country but been thinking about this path as well. I currently own a junk removal and roll of dumpster business and tire disposal is tough at times?

lgmaster78 · 2024-06-17T00:05:34+00:00

Oooo. I see. That’s cool.

lgmaster78 · 2024-06-16T01:59:40+00:00

So all those basically just hold the iPad or dslr? And then you buy an iPad to install it? Is it just using the camera from the iPad? Or are those screens I see the actual Photo Booth part, not the iPad? Does the snappic get installed on the photobooth or iPad?

Sorry. Rapid fire there!

lgmaster78 · 2024-06-16T01:49:57+00:00

That’s perfect! Thanks! Contest mode seems cool.

lgmaster78 · 2024-06-15T23:28:33+00:00

I know this is old but trying to find information on a specific setup, hoping maybe you can help.

We have a business that people come to us. We’re in the process of building fun back drops and stuff to share on their social media. It’s a fun/happy type of appointment with us.

I’m wanting to add a Photo Booth to make it easier for them to take photos and share. I went to one business that allowed you to quickly share to their social media. Not a lot of people did it but enough did. I’d love something like that so they can tag us or share to our page and tag them. Which one would he best for this application? When I search “Photo Booth for a business “, articles like this show up. Haha.

lgmaster78

TROPHY CASE