u/Far-Tennis5844

The state of app dev posts on reddit is crazy these days lol

First, they list a 4-page scope like:

• Native iOS/Android app
• Full backend, payment gateway, real-time tracking
• Custom AI recommendation engine
• "Must be ready in 2 weeks"

Then you scroll down to the bottom:

Compensation: $150 total, or the budget isn't even mentioned at all.

Ever since AI dropped, clients really think you just press a "Generate Full Production App" button, sip coffee, and deliver it in 20 minutes. They think code has zero value now, so the budgets are down in the mud while expectations are through the roof.

Don't get me wrong, you still find the occasional goldmine post with a real client who actually respects technical execution and pays normal rates, but wading through 100 posts offering fast food money just to find one is exhausting.

Bro, AI gives you code snippets and broken CSS, it doesn't architect, test, and deploy a whole enterprise app. We are literally starving out here trying to find clients with realistic rates.

Drop the actual budget upfront, and stop offering fast food money for a full tech stack ffs 😭

I see founders posting every single day offering 10% equity or 20% rev-share once they launch, and almost every single time, those builds turn into complete ghost towns within a month.

Look, I totally get it from the founder side. Cash is tight, you’re taking a massive leap, and you want someone who genuinely gives a damn about the vision instead of just taking a check.

But from a developer’s perspective, rev-share on an app with zero revenue is literally $0. And trading 150 hours of intense build time for a sliver of equity in an unvalidated idea is a massive gamble. The exact second rent is due or a paying client lands in their inbox, your unpaid v1 gets buried at the bottom of the pile.

That’s when the nightmare cycle starts. Your eight week launch date stretches into six months stretch, the dev gets burnt out working nights for free while feature scope creeps, and the whole relationship sours. You end up with a half baked codebase no one else wants to touch and a messy cap table before you’ve even made a dollar.

Paying a clear, fixed rate for a razor-thin v1 fixes all of this, DEAD SIMPLE ! You keep 100% of your company and revenue, the dev stays locked in to deliver fast, and you actually get a live product into real users' hands before your momentum completely dies.

If you have an idea you're trying to scope out for a fast launch, drop a comment or send a DM, happy to help you map out a realistic v1 setup!