Reference
What it costs
You can build and publish your first apps for $0, apart from Claude Code Pro. Money only comes in when you want something more: your own web address, AI inside your app, payments, or the phone stores.
Prices and limits here are as of October 2026. Check before relying on them, because they change. This is not tax or legal advice.
The table
| Stage | Cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code (Pro plan) | about $20 a month | You need it to run Shipyard at all |
| Learning and demo apps | $0 | Free GitHub, free Vercel (Hobby plan), free Supabase |
| Your own web address (optional) | about $10 to $15 a year | A domain from a registrar such as Cloudflare Registrar (about $10.50 for a .com) or Porkbun (about $11). Without one you keep a free name.vercel.app address |
| AI features inside your app | $5 or more, once | Paid to your AI provider. OpenAI needs at least $5 of credit. OpenRouter has free models, limited to about 50 requests a day |
| Taking payments | Vercel Pro, $20 a month, plus payment fees | The free Vercel plan does not allow commercial use, and payments count as commercial |
| A serious database | Supabase Pro, $25 a month | Once real people depend on your app. Free projects pause after a week of no use |
| Phone app stores | Apple $99 a year, Google $25 once | Apple also needs a Mac. Google needs 12 testers for 14 days first |
What "free" means in practice
- GitHub: free account. Free private repositories do not support auto-merge or required checks. Public repositories do, but make sure your code holds no secrets first.
- Vercel Hobby: free for personal, non-commercial projects. There is a limit of 100 deploys a day.
- Supabase free: 2 active projects in total (across all your organizations). A third app can live inside an existing project in its own space with Shipyard's shared mode. A project pauses after a week without use. Waking it up is one click in the dashboard, so an app you built in class may be asleep next week.
- Email (Resend): Resend has a free plan with a monthly and daily email limit; check resend.com/pricing. To email people other than yourself you need your own domain.
- CodeRabbit (AI review of pull requests): free for public repositories. Private repositories need a paid plan, or you can run
/code-reviewfor free.
Payments cost more than the monthly fee
Stripe charges a fee on every payment. In Europe that is roughly 1.5% plus a small fixed amount for cards from the European Economic Area, with extra for subscriptions and for the tax tool. Rates differ by country and card, so read Stripe's pricing page for yours.
A merchant of record (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, or Stripe Managed Payments) is the seller on paper. They handle sales tax, VAT and invoices for you, for about 3.5% to 5% plus fees. It may suit you if you sell worldwide to consumers and do not want the tax work. Shipyard's billing module uses plain Stripe, so with a merchant of record you would stop at the pricing decision.
Phone and desktop stores
| Store | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Apple App Store | $99 a year | Needs a Mac with Xcode |
| Google Play | $25 once | New personal accounts run a closed test with 12 testers for 14 days |
| Microsoft Store | free for individuals | For Windows apps |
| Mac or Windows download | free | Signing a Mac app needs the paid Apple account. Unsigned apps show a scary warning |
An installable web app (PWA) costs nothing, and many apps never need the stores.
Your Claude Pro allowance
Claude Pro limits are shared with chat on claude.ai. There is a limit per five hours and a limit per week. Building apps uses a lot of it, so on build days skip the claude.ai chat and check /usage inside Claude Code to see what is left.
Things that use the most:
- Product videos. Plan 2 to 4 hours of back-and-forth, and a big share of a Pro plan's usage. Do it after your app is live.
- Long chats. A conversation that has grown long costs more every message. Start a new one for each topic.
- Resuming an idle session. After a few minutes of inactivity the saved context expires, and the next message makes the agent re-read everything.
- Your strongest model on routine work. Use
/modelto switch to a cheaper one for simple jobs.
How much setup and a first app use depends on how often you change your mind along the way, and we have no measured number to give you. If you hit the limit, nothing is lost. /shipyard:setup continues at the saved step when you come back.
Keep AI costs under control
If your app uses an AI service:
- Use one key per app, so you can see what each one costs and cut one off without breaking the others.
- Set a monthly spend limit and an email alert at the provider.
- Require sign-in for AI features.
- Add a daily cap inside the app and a limit per person.
See the practices page for a prompt that adds these.
The video tool's licence
Product videos are built with Remotion. It is free for individuals and companies of up to three people. Bigger companies need a paid licence: see remotion.dev/license. Voice for the narration costs a few cents per minute of speech.