Let’s Look At The Data
I just instantiated a new project: a WordPress plugin for online event management — Zoom webinars, recurring meetings, registrations, reminders, follow-ups, recordings, and calendar integration.
It took me an hour or two to get to the point of having a solid Project Instantiation Prompt so that all the details were clear. The cost of instantiation — a single prompt with the project details that took Opus 4.6 (by Anthropic) about 10 minutes to process — was about $5.
I used Cursor’s free Composer agent to generate this PDF showing what was created and what it would have cost if a professional developer with 20 years of experience had built it (which would have taken about 2 weeks instead of 10 minutes): $7,000–$16,000.
Let’s Look At The Data
So the $5 was well-spent, I believe 🙂
In general, a quality new plugin feature tends to cost about $6 to produce with Opus — probably half that with Sonnet 4.6. By the time I get to 20 chats, I usually have a pretty decent plugin. If I get to 50, it’s exceptional. So call it $250 for an exceptional plugin that does everything I want it to do — one where I own the IP and it integrates perfectly with my system. A good deal.
Time to start selling…
A senior developer might spend two weeks building what AI instantiates in 10 minutes.
Own the IP, skip the invoice — AI-assisted development changes the economics of WordPress plugins.
