Ask HN: IF you could get a functional prototype in 24h for €5k,would you buy it?

3 points

6 months ago

Hi HN, I’m currently validating a service model where we act as a "shadow engineering team" to deliver fully functional prototypes in 24 hours for a flat fee of around €5k.

The specific problem we are targeting is Engineering Capacity.

Every founder or product lead I talk to has a backlog of 5-10 high-potential ideas that are currently dead in the water. They can't build them because their core engineering team is buried in maintenance, technical debt, or the main roadmap. They literally "don't have the cycles" to test anything new. And when they try with replit/lovable they end with a lot of slop and get swamped after a couple of cycles.

Here is where I am stuck, and I’d love your honest take:

I look at the current landscape of "AI Coding" and see marketplaces like Fiverr AI Coding Services

You can find people offering to build AI apps for $500–$1,000.

My genuine question is: Why aren't these cheap services exploding?

With the capabilities of tools like Cursor, replit you’d think these marketplaces would be the default solution for bypassing internal engineering bottlenecks, but they aren't.

- Is it the management overhead? (You don't have time to manage a random freelancer?) - Is it a quality/security fear? (Putting proprietary ideas into a cheap gig economy service?) - Is it simply that they don't understand business logic?

The Core Question: If you are sitting on a backlog of ideas you can't build, is a €5k price point for a "guaranteed, professional-grade" outcome in 24h a no-brainer to bypass your internal bottleneck? Or would you still try to hack it together with cheaper freelancers/internal resources?

I’m trying to figure out if the value is in the code (which is cheap) or the reliability/speed (which seems rare).