Learn React for nine months, use AI as a debugging aid, and build a keyword research SaaS instead of paying $15,000
An agency owner replaced a $15,000 developer quote by learning React from a course, then using AI mainly for debugging, to build a keyword research and content brief SaaS with paying customers.
Evidence: The author reports this. We have not checked it beyond reading the source.
The business problem
An agency wanted to productise 15 to 20 hours of manual keyword research per client, but a developer build was unaffordable.
What was tried
The author studied React for about three hours a day and built practice apps, then started the product and discarded three attempts at the core keyword engine. From around month seven AI helped with debugging and about 20 to 30 percent of the final code, mostly boilerplate. The stack is React, Hono, Supabase and Cloudflare. The product learns a business from its URL, produces funnel-mapped keyword strategies and content briefs, and later added brand-voice analysis in about four days.
What was reported (positive)
The author says the product now serves paying customers, counts the first non-friend user in month eleven as launch, and reports about $100 of build spend plus a few hundred dollars on courses. No customer count, revenue or retention is given.
Limitations
All claims are self-reported with no pricing or revenue data. The comparison costs and the AI code share are the author's estimates, and no code or architecture is shown. It took eleven months, which is a different path from a quick AI-only build. The post promotes a tool and the author's newsletter.
What you need
Months of study time (about six hours a day), a React course, and Supabase and Cloudflare accounts. Running cost is about $5 a month plus API costs.
Sources
- Vibe Stack Lab (Substack) ↗ Firsthand write-up, published October 21, 2025
Source published: October 21, 2025. Last reviewed here: October 11, 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Tools in this workflow
- Supabase: Database and authTry Supabase
- Cloudflare: Workers hostingTry Cloudflare
Related workflows
Ship a first desktop and web product with Cursor and learn the 10 percent rule of launch work
A product manager describes building a macOS image-search app and its website with Cursor and an AI assistant, and the hosting, packaging and signing work that took far longer than the code.
Test mass-produced AI pages cheaply: 60,000 GPT-generated pages and what crawlers did
A deliberate experiment built a 60,000-page site with a small OpenAI model for about $10 and recorded that AI crawlers requested it far more than Googlebot. The author expects it to be deindexed.
Run three small AI-generated directory sites on a nightly GitHub Actions job with Claude Haiku and Astro
An architecture write-up of three niche directory sites whose content is generated by Claude Haiku, rebuilt nightly, kept small and linked to primary sources, in a six-month experiment on whether such sites can rank.
Classify survey comments for churn risk with Claude Haiku, Supabase and n8n and get a weekly theme digest
A step-by-step build that tags each open-text survey response with themes, sentiment and a churn signal using a cheap Claude model, alerts on risky ones, and emails a weekly summary of themes.