wcynthia
wcynthia on Hacker News
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.
Hey @lillee3377 This was due to an issue on our end where it was not properly updating the status. Should be fixed now
EDIT: You can now download source code and Android App builds. iOS apps to follow soon!
Thanks! You can now download source code and Android apk builds. iOS builds coming soon
Just added screenshots to the homepage. Not exactly the best showcase, but it's a start. We'll be adding interactive mobile apps to browse through soon
It's nothing much, but I just added sample screenshots of apps to the homepage. Plan is to eventually be able to browse through generated app samples interactively
Thanks for your feedback. And for giving Avid a try! I'm not particularly impressed by the speed myself and it's definitely something we're working on
I totally get what you mean. We do offer 15 free messages for the month, and you can come back the next month for 15 more (capped at 5 a day). The AI generation costs do factor in a lot towards the pricing, among other things like infra. Hopefully with future reduced costs we can offer those savings back to you.
I am not sure what you mean by difference in code generation.
Flutter is better positioned for our use case.
Yeah, it's part of our roadmap and will be shipping soon!
Yes, it provides pretty quick deployments. We just hit the limit a few minutes ago. Had to upgrade
That was the idea from day one. Can't wait to ship that feature
Posted by
wcynthia on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @07:29AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.getavid.dev
Hey HN. We built an AI agent that creates beautiful Flutter Apps, much like v0 or Lovable. The agent carefully makes UI UX considerations, generates Flutter code, and you get a preview on your browser.I've gone through lots and lots of iterations to help the agent produce beautiful results. Would love your feedback.Ability to download App files and flutter code should be ready this coming week....
Posted by
wcynthia on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @07:37AM
from the ask-hn dept.
My startup Quill just launched on product hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quill-dev-tools). The product helps mobile app teams get aligned by providing emulators on the web and allowing team members to comment and give feedback.You can also create no-code tests by clicking around your mobile app and run these tests before merging a Pull Request. Let me know what your thoughts are.