Merry Christmas HN Sending Warm Greetings to Everyone: https://festivegreeting.vercel.app/?id=90564ef5-f137-43be-b6...

I’m hacking on different side projects but currently I’m working on developing a platform for helping freelancers or small agencies understand aws costs and optimize their environments

Its been a pain point for a lot of the clients I work with helping them understand and optimize their aws costs

They might get a surprise 1000 dollar bill and won’t be able to understand why it happened or what incurred that costs

+1 on that Opus 4.5 is a game changer I have used to refactor and modernize one of my old react project using bootstrap, You have to be really precise when prompting and having solid CLAUDE.md works really well

That thought makes me excited and scared

I haven’t written any single line of code but i have been able to plan and come up with new ideas faster

I’m more of a product manager than a coder due to these new AI coding tools

Its even better when using claude code

What do you get with claude code that isn't already in cursor? I've only used it in cursor

This is true, Being in corporate kills your creativity

That’s a great advice,

Have you heard of any success stories where people made good income building micro-tools

I see, That’s a good approach but how do find clients i must ask

Like what’s your goto approach here

Be good at something and help someone with that.

If you're not good yet, do it for free first until you get good, cause it will take you awhile to debug and troubleshoot and work out the kinks of what you're trying to do.

Then do it for cheap until you're an expert. You have little to no overheard a the beginning (other than time invested), so you can do it cheaper than anyone else. Think of it like you're taking a 50% pay cut: 50% is paid to you now, and the other 50% that you don't get now is in the form of experience because you got to do a job now that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to do, because 100% cost to them would be too much. Then that 50% comes back to you in 5 years, because now you have one more tool in your toolbelt. The next time someone needs help with that, it will take you 50% less time (or probably more like 80%).

People value their time, but they won't pay for something that saves them 10 or 20 minutes, especially if it just takes a quick Google to solve (although you'd be surprised how many people can't do a simple Google to solve a problem. Maybe start there?)

Become so good that you save them an hour, or 3, then maybe half a day, or a few days.

Then charge an equivalent rate for the amount of time or hassle you've saved them.

I learned a great piece of wisdom from some random soul on Hacker News that I'll never be able to thank: increase your rate with each new client, until you start getting push back. Then you'll know your worth, or at least the appropriate range. I went from $25/hour when I first started, to $175/hour now. It took 10 years, but now the $175 is a bargain for most people, because I'm no longer saving them an hour or two here and there; I'm the difference between their business working or not.

That's a solid Advice

Thank you

That’s really cool.

Did you try the new pro mode