{"slug": "my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget", "title": "My results for an AI building challenge on almost no budget", "summary": "A developer built a full-featured spreadsheet application called HolySheet in a few days using AI tools, spending less than $100. The app includes formulas, pivot tables, charts, and rich formatting, challenging the notion that building complex business software requires massive budgets.", "body_md": "I've been building projects I find interesting with AI tools since the beginning of the year, and lately I've been focusing on increasingly complex software, partially just as a challenge to myself, and partially to determine at what point the AI tools start to fail in the area of software development. For a recent project, I picked an intentionally too-ambitious goal: can I recreate most of a complex business application (in this case, Excel) in a week, for less than $100? How far can I actually get on that?\n\nAfter planning it out pretty thoroughly with Claude, and brainstorming some additional AI enhanced features (e.g. plain english explanations for complex formulas and error diagnostics), I started on the implementation using the most recent Opus model. The bulk of that work only took a few days, with a few additional days of testing and polishing. I'm pretty happy with the results (the name HolySheet occurred to me and seemed pretty apt, so I went with that)... you can check it out for yourself here: [https://www.holysheet.dev](https://www.holysheet.dev)\n\nI was able to build out most of the spreadsheet basics you'd expect (file manipulation, formulas, rich cell formatting and styling) as well as pivot tables and charts, multiple sheets, etc. I don't want to just do a feature dump here in this post, but the app is pretty full featured.\n\nAnyway, it does make me wonder where all the token spend I hear about in the tech news is actually going... like if one person can create a useful, complex business app in a few days for something like $50, what exactly are companies spending $500M on? Honestly it's a bit baffling. (I realize this is simplifying things, but I think my point is still valid.)\n\nAt any rate, I welcome any feedback and comments on this project. And if you'd like to collaborate on an interesting software project, please do reach out.\n\n-Jeff", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/highdesertapps/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget-1fek", "published_at": "2026-07-09 22:40:37+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-09 23:35:57.560182+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Claude", "Opus", "HolySheet", "Jeff"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-results-for-an-ai-building-challenge-on-almost-no-budget.jsonld"}}