What Vibe Coding Actually Costs: The Honest Math Nobody Is Publishing
Vibe coding a prototype costs $40/month. Running it as a real business costs $6,000 to $32,000 in Year 1. Traditionally, hiring a contractor or agency to build the same MVP would cost $30,000 to $150,000. The gap between the $40 prototype and the $6,000+ production product is where most vibe-coded projects die, and almost nobody is publishing the honest math that fills it. Matt Shumer's essay "Something Big Is Happening" hit 80 million views on X in under a week. Andrej Karpathy, the man who coined "vibe coding," later admitted he hand-coded his most ambitious project because AI tools were "net unhelpful." Collins Dictionary named vibe coding its 2025 Word of the Year. MIT Technology Review listed Generative Coding among its 2026 Breakthrough Technologies. Stack Overflow's 2025 survey of 49,000+ developers found 84% are now using or planning to use AI coding tools. The tools are real. The revolution is real. But the costs between prototype and production are where the truth lives, and that is what this post breaks down, dollar by dollar.