@chris.raroque: PLAYBOOK NO. 1/12 ✶ My $600/month team… Forget the coding for a second. Even just for operations, these subscriptions are worth it. I spend $400 on two Codex subscriptions and $200 on Claude. That’s $7,200 a year to help me run four apps full time. Codex helps with customer support, marketing, App Store pages, feature launches, keeping my help centers updated, and monitoring reviews and bugs. These are just a few examples. I regularly have 10+ agents running across my apps. It genuinely feels like having a team behind me, even though I’m still the one directing the work and reviewing it. Before AI, I think getting this much help across development and operations could easily have cost me $15,000 a month in payroll. That’s my estimate, but $600 doesn’t come close to what I’d budget for even one ongoing part-time hire in the U.S. Then you factor in the coding, and it becomes EXTREMELY worth it. I used to ship one or two features a week, which already felt pretty fast. Now I’m shipping one or two a day while keeping up with bugs and everything else across my apps. The development help alone feels like having another one or two full-time developers working with me. But please don’t take this as “you need $600/month in subscriptions to build an app.” You don’t 🥲 If you’re working on one app, I’d start with one Codex subscription and use it for both coding and operations. If you keep running out of usage, then consider a second subscription. You might want capacity for development separate from support, marketing, and all the other work. For me, that could mean another Codex subscription, or adding Claude if design and really hard coding problems are a big part of the work. The reason I’m comfortable spending this much is how much work I’m actually getting through. Start with one and give it more of the jobs you’re already doing before paying for more. Follow for part two, where I’ll show you how I get my code reviewed when I’m the only developer 👀 #softwaredeveloper #appdevelopment #solodev #buildinpublic #codex

Chris Raroque

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Friday 11 September 2026 17:29:11 GMT