€50,000 Quote vs. Two Hours with Claude Code

One hour. Fifty-five minutes.

That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code.

A working tool, the one the company needed. By evening, it was running on staging.

THE €50,000 QUOTE FOR A SIMPLE PILOT

The task came from our CEO. A tool that our customers would interact with directly on the website. The scope was specific enough to define. Not trivial, but also not an engineering mystery.

I took over the conversation with one Czech software firm. Colleagues had started it but did not have the capacity to continue.

I asked for a rough idea of price and timeline. Not a binding quote. A range. Enough to plan.

Their reply was a single sentence I will not forget:

"We cannot give you an estimate, not even a rough one."

For a rough estimate, they explained, they would first need to conduct a paid analysis. Two and a half thousand euros. To examine the problem properly.

I did not take the analysis.

ONE AND A HALF PERSON-MONTHS: FOR WHAT

Later in the conversation, without the paid analysis, the number slipped out anyway.

Roughly one and a half person-months of work. Somewhere above €50,000 to launch a simple pilot.

A simple pilot.

For over fifty thousand euros.

Five years ago, I would have taken the quote to our two CEOs. We would have weighed it against an off-the-shelf product and its limitations.

There is a third option now.

BUILDING IT WITH CLAUDE CODE IN UNDER TWO HOURS

I walked into the IT meeting with a short presentation. I had mapped the options: build with the external firm we had already been talking to, or build it ourselves with an AI coding agent.

That same afternoon, I built it.

The development did not need iteration cycles. The agent proposed a plan, started implementing, and within the first few minutes something was already working. The rest was refinement. Adding features. Tightening behaviour. Then handling the edge cases I noticed as I tested.

The only thing I brought to that build was a clear idea of what the tool was supposed to do.

Not a specification. Not an architecture diagram. Just a clear idea.

That turned out to be enough.

In Is AI Making Us Dumber? I described interview candidates who came in with polished AI outputs they could not defend, outputs built on problems they had not understood. They had delegated the thinking before they had done it. This project worked because I had done the opposite. I knew what the tool needed to do. The agent did the rest.

WHAT SOFTWARE AGENCIES ARE REALLY CHARGING FOR

I want to be careful here.