I asked Claude to build analytics from scratch. It cost 47,000 tokens. The alternative cost 2 lines.

I asked Claude to build analytics from scratch. It cost 47,000 tokens. The alternative cost 2 lines. A real comparison: 47,000 tokens and three hours of back-and-forth versus 700 tokens and four minutes. The Waste I was building a SaaS dashboard and asked Claude to add analytics. What followed was an expensive lesson: First prompt: Database schema with SQLite DDL for events, sessions, and page views (~15,000 tokens) Second prompt: Event tracking middleware and utility functions (~18,000 tokens) Third prompt: Dashboard with charts, graphs, and cohort analysis. Required follow-up fixes. I had reinvented a wheel that hundreds of people had already reinvented, and done it worse than all of them. Final tally: roughly 47,000 tokens across three hours, producing code that wasn't production-ready without major additions like data retention policies and GDPR compliance. The Discovery I found IndieStack - a directory of indie tools with an MCP server integration. Setup was two commands: pip inst