Notes for the person deciding whether to build something, and what to build first. Budgets, timelines, the trade-offs nobody mentions until the invoice arrives. Nothing here is written for other developers: if a piece cannot help you decide something or ask a better question, it does not get published.
7 articles so far, in four groups: what an internal tool costs and how it is scoped, what changes when the product lives on a phone, how automated tests earn their keep, and what it takes to release and keep something alive. New ones arrive every few days — the schedule is set, so the queue does not depend on anybody remembering.
This is a business decision that quietly rewrites your software. Pick it before the build, because each answer needs a different thing to exist on day one.
Disintermediation is not a bug you can patch. It is a pricing problem wearing a technical costume, and the platforms that survive it solve it with what they offer, not with what they block.
Holding a buyer’s money until the work is accepted is the feature that makes a marketplace a marketplace. It is also what separates an eight-week build from a twelve-week one. Here is what you are buying.
The demo always works. What fails in month two is the paid order whose seller was banned, the deposit that half-arrived, and the dispute about a file nobody kept. A list worth reading before you sign anything.
Generation costs money every time someone taps the button. Here is the metering, refund and abuse question to settle before you ship an AI feature, and what it looks like when it is done properly.
Before the catalogue, before the app, one question decides your build, your legal shape and your support load: at what moment does the buyer stop owning the money and the seller start.
A two-sided marketplace is three products, not one. Here is what genuinely drives the timeline, and which decisions add months without adding value for your first users.
Reading rather than deciding? The case studies are the same arguments applied to two real products, with the prices, the timelines and a demo you can open on sample data.