My Vercel v0 weekend: A working app, a happy friend, and a $50 bill

3 points by ryado 298 days ago | 5 comments

I'm an experienced backend engineer; frontend has always been my bottleneck. I've been experimenting with AI tools to bridge this gap, and my recent experience with Vercel v0 was notable.

Fueled by a desire to impress a friend (and some alcohol) last weekend, I built a feature-rich internal app for his business; ~ think a feature-rich time tracker with auth, roles, export, etc. To keep the momentum going, I bypassed the rate limits and spent about $50 on a Pro sub and credits over two days. The result: a working MVP delivered and in use by Monday.

The speed was incredible, not just code generation, but the entire dev-to-deploy cycle. v0 instantly solved the "blank canvas" problem for me.

The sober question now is: was that the best use of $50? The backend I could have built in a similar timeframe, so the value was entirely in accelerating the UI/design for me.

I'm trying to assess the landscape of tools for developers like me. My research so far:

Claude: Intrigued, but pricing is unclear.

Copilot: I use it daily at work for backend, but it feels weak for generating complex, well-designed UI components.

v0 vs. Bolt: v0 felt miles ahead for the initial UI generation.

My question for HN:

For a developer whose main weakness is frontend design, is there anything that truly matches v0's 0-to-1 speed right now? Or is it in a class of its own, and the ~$50 cost for an MVP is simply the new price of admission for this kind of leverage in my case?

I think v0 is an amazing product, but I'm pragmatic about tools. I’ve just learned to treat companies the same way they treat customers: always squeeze the juice, move on when the value drops.

Curious to hear what workflows others have found effective.

ryado 298 days ago |

Author here. This really boils down to an ROI question.

On one hand, a $50 cash outlay for a validated MVP that's in the hands of users within 48 hours seems like an incredibly good deal from a business perspective.

On the other, my engineering brain is asking if 90% of the same result could be achieved for $10 (a Copilot sub) and just a few more hours of effort.

I'm especially interested to hear from others who build side projects or MVPs: *How do you evaluate the cost of these 'pay-per-generation' AI tools versus traditional flat-rate subscriptions in your budget?*

bryanrasmussen 298 days ago | |

>On the other, my engineering brain is asking if 90% of the same result could be achieved for $10 (a Copilot sub) and just a few more hours of effort.

my engineering brain is asking:

does "few more hours of effort" mean 2 more hours of effort?

If so do you get paid less than $20 per hour?

If few more hours of effort means more than 2 how many more hours of effort do you think it would have to be for it to be ridiculous for making that effort?

ryado 298 days ago | | |

I see what you mean, and had the same thought while I wrote this comment.

Here is the catch, something like copilot is a month subscription.

V0 is pay by usage, and in my small sample size we talking > +$20/day vs $XX / month (20 or 200 idk)

amacalac 298 days ago |

$50 to move past your bottleneck? I’d say that’s worth a fortune in ROI if you had:

a) poor design sense; b) poor design engineering (you have good design sense but can’t figure out how to build it); c) taken more than your hourly salary to learn a + b.

Agree with understanding if you could do it cheaper and faster next time, but the rule of 3 usually applies: “good, fast and cheap, pick 2”

It looks like you’re on the right track; pragmatism about specific tools, and their use cases.

Hopefully your friend sees the value in the tool and a big ROI too!