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Build, Buy, or Vibe-Code? · For business owners

Vibe coding, hiring or buying? An app's true 12-month cost

By Agentum R&D · 5 min read
Published · Updated

Short answer In our example, year one costs about $1,400 to buy a booking tool, $4,900 to vibe-code one and $13,600 to hire a developer. When you build, subscriptions are an eighth of the bill or less; people's time is the rest. If a tool covers most of your needs, buy.

Lovable's Pro plan costs $25 a monthSource 1. Supabase's Pro plan, the database many AI-built apps run on, costs from $25 a monthSource 2. Together that's $600 a year, about an eighth of the first-year bill for building a simple app yourself. The rest is time.

We priced one ordinary app three ways: online booking with reminders and a simple customer list, for a business with three staff. Here is what year one costs if you build it yourself with an AI tool (vibe coding), hire a developer, or buy a tool that already does it.

What a booking app costs in year one

Every number below is an assumption, so swap in yours. The hours are our estimates, not measurements. We value your time at $50 an hour. We price a developer at $64.44 an hour: the May 2025 US median wage for software developers, QA analysts and testers as one groupSource 3, before benefits. Freelancers and agencies usually charge more, so treat it as a floor.

Year-one cost of a booking app: vibe coding vs hiring a developer vs buying (US dollars, our assumptions)
Cost lineVibe-code itHire a developerBuy a tool
Subscriptions and hosting600300576
Building or setting up2,0009,666250
Upkeep over 12 months1,8003,093600
Security check before launch516In build hours (ask for it)0 (vendor)
Your time managing the workIn build and upkeep500In build and upkeep
Total≈ 4,900≈ 13,600≈ 1,400

How we got each column

Vibe-code it: Lovable Pro and Supabase Pro at $25 a month each ($600). Pro includes 100 credits a month and Lovable sells top-ups on demandSource 1, so a 40-hour build may cost more than the plan. Supabase Pro keeps the database from being paused and adds daily backupsSource 2. Then forty hours of your evenings to build it ($2,000), three hours a month of fixes and changes ($1,800), and one day of a developer's time to check its security before customers use it ($516). That last line is the one people skip, and the reason we wrote a 10-minute leak check.

Hire a developer: 150 hours to build ($9,666), four hours a month of upkeep ($3,093), Supabase Pro for hosting ($300) and ten hours of your time briefing and testing ($500). Ask for the security check to be part of the build. If your developer charges $100 an hour, hiring comes to about $20,600.

Buy a tool: a scheduling tool with reminders and contact profilesSource 4, such as Calendly, whose pricing page lists $10 a seat a month on Standard and $16 on Teams, billed yearly; month to month costs moreSource 4. We chose Teams so bookings can rotate among your three staff: three seats come to $576 a year. Add five hours to set it up and an hour a month to keep it tidy. It is not a full customer database, which is the trade-off.

Bar chart of year-one cost for a simple booking and customer app. Buy a tool: about $1,400. Vibe-code it: about $4,900. Hire a developer: about $13,600. When you build, subscriptions are a thin dark segment; when you buy, they are about 40% of a much smaller bill.
When you build, subscriptions are a sliver. When you buy, they're 40% of a much smaller bill.

Plug in your own numbers

Year one = monthly plans × 12 + build hours × the builder's hourly rate + upkeep hours a month × 12 × that rate + a security check + your hours briefing × your rate.

With our hours, building it yourself costs $1,116 plus 76 hours of your time, and hiring costs $13,059 plus 10 hours of your time. They meet when your hour is worth about $181. Below that, building it yourself costs less than hiring. Because $64.44 is a floor, treat $181 as the low end: at $100 an hour for the developer, the line moves to about $283.

Year two is different, because the build is paid for: about $1,200 to keep buying, $2,400 to keep a vibe-coded app running, and $3,400 for a developer's upkeep.

What upkeep actually is

Reminders that stop sending because an email setting changed. A new field your front desk asks for. A builder update that breaks a page. A key that needs changing. None of it is dramatic, and all of it lands on whoever owns the app. Both build columns also leave out the cost of sending reminder emails; Calendly includes them.

Three costs the price pages don't show

Free tiers aren't for running a business

Supabase pauses free projects after a week without activitySource 2. That's fine for a prototype and a problem for a booking page that gets quiet in January. If customers use it, pay for a plan.

Keeping outsiders out can cost a plan upgrade

Lovable's built-in way to keep outsiders out, Internal publish, lets only logged-in members of your workspace open the appSource 1. It's on the Business plan at $50 a month, double Pro.

Health data can turn $300 of hosting into $7,200 or more

If you're a US healthcare provider, or you store patient records for one, HIPAA likely appliesSource 5, and the services that hold those records for you need a written business associate agreementSource 5. On Supabase, HIPAA support is a paid add-on available on its Team plan, which starts at $599 a monthSource 2: about $7,200 a year before the add-on. Check this before you choose any platform, not after you build on one.

This is general information, not legal advice. Check with a lawyer for your situation.

When to buy, vibe-code or hire

Buy when a tool already does most of what you need. For bookings, invoices or a customer list, it almost always will. You give up some fit and get someone else to handle security, backups and updates.

Vibe-code when the app is for your own team, holds nothing sensitive, and you enjoy building it. Keep it small, and budget the security check.

Hire when the app takes payments, holds health or children's data, or is how you make money. A middle path works well: build the first version yourself to learn what you need, then pay a developer to review and harden it before customers arrive.

  1. Does a tool already do most of it? Buy.
  2. Is your hour worth more than about $180? Price a developer before you build it yourself.
  3. Health data, children's data or payments? Hire, and check the data rules first.
  4. Building it yourself? Budget the security check.
  5. Customers using it? Not on a free tier.

Sources

  1. Lovable Pricing. Retrieved . ↩ ↩ ↩
  2. Pricing & Fees (Supabase). Retrieved . ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  3. Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook). Retrieved . ↩
  4. Pricing (Calendly). Retrieved . ↩ ↩
  5. Business Associates (US Department of Health and Human Services). Retrieved . ↩ ↩

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