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Ask HN: IF you could get a functional prototype in 24h for €5k,would you buy it?

3•altras•1d ago
Hi HN, I’m currently validating a service model where we act as a "shadow engineering team" to deliver fully functional prototypes in 24 hours for a flat fee of around €5k.

The specific problem we are targeting is Engineering Capacity.

Every founder or product lead I talk to has a backlog of 5-10 high-potential ideas that are currently dead in the water. They can't build them because their core engineering team is buried in maintenance, technical debt, or the main roadmap. They literally "don't have the cycles" to test anything new. And when they try with replit/lovable they end with a lot of slop and get swamped after a couple of cycles.

Here is where I am stuck, and I’d love your honest take:

I look at the current landscape of "AI Coding" and see marketplaces like Fiverr AI Coding Services

You can find people offering to build AI apps for $500–$1,000.

My genuine question is: Why aren't these cheap services exploding?

With the capabilities of tools like Cursor, replit you’d think these marketplaces would be the default solution for bypassing internal engineering bottlenecks, but they aren't.

- Is it the management overhead? (You don't have time to manage a random freelancer?) - Is it a quality/security fear? (Putting proprietary ideas into a cheap gig economy service?) - Is it simply that they don't understand business logic?

The Core Question: If you are sitting on a backlog of ideas you can't build, is a €5k price point for a "guaranteed, professional-grade" outcome in 24h a no-brainer to bypass your internal bottleneck? Or would you still try to hack it together with cheaper freelancers/internal resources?

I’m trying to figure out if the value is in the code (which is cheap) or the reliability/speed (which seems rare).

Appreciate the feedback.

Comments

throwawayffffas•1d ago
The value is in the reliability, not necessarily the speed. In most cases 24 hours are not enough for me to give you a full rundown of what I want done. You can make it 10k and a week and you will probably get better results. I say this with no actual knowledge but my intuition is that the overlap between people that will engage with a 24 hour turnaround promise and the people that have the authority to spend 5k is much smaller than the corresponding week/10k combination.
nacozarina•1d ago
Creating the code was never the hard part. Not ever.

Here’s the hard part. Listening to workers describe their work process, artifacts created & outcomes achieved. To really learn their world. It’s understanding where their current tools & collaborators are awkwardly aligned. It’s about you learning minutiae of your client’s organizational & emotional baggage. It’s about navigating & resolving the forty different versions of truth they tell you. It’s about you doing this over breakfast & dinner for them for months. Years, if you are any good at it.

Generating code was never the hard part, welcome to the engineering team.

elbci•1d ago
This! Offering a "$5k 24h prototype" is like trying to sell a $500 WordPress theme at a pitch for "Amazon new website" - both expensive for what it is and orders of magnitude below what's required.
JohnFen•1d ago
It entirely depends on what my bottleneck is. Some wouldn't be worth paying anywhere near 5k for, others would be worth paying more for.

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