[wcynthia]

When we first launched our vibe coding mobile app builder last year, we got quite a bit of traction. We’d built a Lovable for mobile apps that built functional apps from ideas. We also ended up racking up over $1000 in Anthropic API costs in less than a week just from free trial AI messages. Shudder! We had a few sales but made huge losses from the free tier usage.

Over the course of 2025, we did all we could to reduce our AI costs, from implementing caching, history management, introducing boilerplate code, and of course, threatening the AI agent “TO NOT BUILD THE ENTIRE APP AT ONCE” :)

After a couple of iterations, and thinking of how to solve this business problem, alongside the guilt of using up precious earth resources to build apps no one was ever going to use, we landed on an idea to do a 'design first then build' approach.

Pure HTML and CSS code is cheap enough, and instant enough, that people quickly know if they’d like to move on to building. This has made a BIG difference for our tiny non-VC funded startup, and, hopefully, for our precious planet.