Loved reading your story. Personal apps are great even they have only one user - the creator itself.

But if only a handful people use the app and it stores data to a single device does the app need authorization / 2FA / login at all as these usually needs a 3rd party service or API (you need to pay for?).

So I've gone a bit different path and cut the costs to about 0$ for creating, publishing and running an app:

1. For someone that could not afford 160$/month subscriptions the alternative is to use cheap/free Chinese models through the chat (not VB code, extensions etc. that needs paid APIs). They are not so bad and generate code that is almost production ready (and free if used through their homepage AI chat).

2. Creating my apps as web apps as PWA and host on my own shared server for 2.50%/month. This set costs for deploying an app to almost 0$ (no AppStore fees, no 12 testers approval on PlayStore needed). Just upload the code and it is live. Everything else is marketing and SEO

This way I've made 50+ apps and games. They are simple but does the job, and the whole process from idea to a final product is less then a week (usually 3 days or the weekend) including basic SEO, submiting to sites like ProductHunt, social media, some basic SEO and link building.

I'm going to write a detailed post about how I'm doing it soon. Till then enjoy some of my apps and games:

https://nonconfirmed.com/miniproductivity/ https://nonconfirmed.com/app/dataset-toolset/ https://nonconfirmed.com/fisher-boy/

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user:	colenikol2
created:	May 1, 2026
karma:	3