Cost pages / Community / forum
How much does it cost to build a community / forum with AI?
About $75 to $185 in plan spend — the subscription money, not what the usage is notionally worth — depending on which builder you point at it. Bolt.new comes out cheapest at about $75, on usage worth $66 of tokens; v0 by Vercel is the expensive end at about $185. That is a community / forum with 4 standard features, built by someone who iterates two or three times per feature — the ×2.5 iteration tax and the +40% debug surcharge are already in these numbers.
Posts, threads, profiles, moderation. Priced as a standard build — that is how many screens and rules it has, not how good it is. Simple has fewer, complex has more.
These tools bill in their own units. Credits are prepaid units of work you get each month; tokens are the chunks of text the AI reads and writes; the rest bill in plain dollars.
Adjust the numbers →HOWMUCHTOVIBECODE.COM
* YOUR ESTIMATE *
builder profile: normal human
Active build time
17–42h
9–21 evenings at 2h
Initial build spend
$50–$100
the plan you pay for, plus usage on top
Time is a modelled range for prompting, reviewing, testing and fixing. It excludes app-store review and other waiting time.
3× Pro 10M at $25/mo — 3 months at full allowance
ALL PLATFORMS · PLAN SPEND
✂ CHEAPEST PLAN SPEND: BOLT.NEW
Plan spend = the subscription money you hand over. Usage value = what the units you burn are worth at this tool’s own rate; nobody invoices you for it. Iteration tax = the extra rounds it takes to get each feature right. Debug surcharge = fixing what breaks.
Tokens are priced by how much work a request takes, and bug-fixing loops are the killer — people have burned 2M+ tokens in a day chasing one bug. Unused tokens roll over one month only, so they last two months at most. Prices verified 2026-08-10.
THANK YOU FOR VIBING
Community / forum cost by platform
Midpoint of each estimate, ranked by plan spend — the cash you actually hand over, on whichever published plan settles the build for least. Usage value is what the units you burn are worth at the platform’s own rate; it is the smaller number, and nobody invoices you for it. “How you pay” names the plan: plans with no overage bill whole months, while the rest bill one month plus whatever spills past the allowance.
| Platform | Units used | Plan spend | Usage value | How you pay | Receipt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bolt.newcheapest | 26.4M tokens | ≈ $75 | ≈ $66 | 3× Pro 10M ($25/mo) | Bolt.new → |
| Claude Code | $152 | ≈ $90 | ≈ $152 | 4× Pro ($20/mo) | Claude Code → |
| Lovable | 319 credits | ≈ $100 | ≈ $80 | 1× Pro 400 ($100/mo) | Lovable → |
| Cursor + Claude | $128 | ≈ $118 | ≈ $128 | Pro+ ($60/mo) + $58 usage | Cursor + Claude → |
| Replit Agent | $177 | ≈ $177 | ≈ $177 | Core ($25/mo) + $152 usage | Replit Agent → |
| v0 by Vercel | $185 | ≈ $185 | ≈ $185 | Plus ($30/mo) + $155 usage | v0 by Vercel → |
Read the full receipt
One page per platform: the line items, the plan you’d need, the gotcha that eats the budget, and whether something cheaper does the same job.
Estimates are ranges, not quotes. Prices verified 2026-08-10. Prices change — see the changelog.