# How I Vibe Coded a $400K/mo App with Claude Code (Full Tutorial)

Channel: Jason Lee
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDOUzlJwM1E
Duration: 20 min
Language: English
Words: 4747
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/hDOUzlJwM1E

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[0:00] I found this app that makes $500,000 per month. If you go to Sensor Tower, you can see that this app is called CoinSnap. This is a coin identifier app, and they're making half a million dollars in a month. An app that just takes a photo of a coin and tell you what it's worth. It literally just have one feature. And my first thought was, okay, so they probably got lucky, maybe a one-hit wonder. So, I actually went digging and I found the company behind it, and this is where it got interesting cuz they don't just have one app. They have an entire portfolio. So, if you

[0:29] look here, Rock Identifier making 100k per month. We've got an antique identifier also making 100k per month. Insect or bug identifier making 40k per month, and the list goes on. So, they basically found a formula. They took one simple idea and they created a standalone app for every niche. Now, you're probably thinking, I don't know how to build an app. I'm not a developer. Well, today you have Cloud Code, and I'm going to show you how to build an app like this from scratch all the way to testing it on your phone and submitting it to the App Store. And you can do this even if you've never written

[0:58] a single line of code in your life. And I'm also going to show you where most people get stuck, how to overcome those issues cuz that's when most people give up. Now, before we build the app, I just want to tell you why building apps is such a lucrative business model in 2026. Cuz most people, when they sell a product online, either a digital product or a physical product that is a one-time purchase, you sell a product to one customer and that customer is gone, right? You're always hunting for new customers every single month. Now, apps work on a completely different model, and I love this for two reasons. Number

[1:25] one, recurring revenue, right? People pay you every month just to keep using the app. So, think of your Netflix subscription, for example. Netflix doesn't need to resell you every single month. You just keep paying. And this app works the same way. Every subscriber that they have is just money coming in automatically month after month. And number two, you can sell it. Once your app makes consistent revenue, it becomes an asset that you can eventually cash out on, right? And on average, people sell apps for two to four times their annual profit. So, just to give you an example, if your app is making $20,000 per month in profit, that is $240,000 a

[1:57] year. And let's say you take the 3x multiple, just the middle number here, you can potentially sell it for about $720,000. But look, I'm not telling you to clone this app and expect to make $500,000 tomorrow. That's not the point. The point is a tiny niche app like this can generate that kind of revenue. And CoinSnap is actually not the only one

[2:16] cuz there's another app called CoinInn. This is basically the same concept. They launched a year later and it was able to pull in $400,000 a month. So, they built app based on the same idea and captured as much of the market without inventing anything new. Now, there are hundreds of apps like this sitting in the App Store right now. Very simple apps solving one specific problem. So, you want to find one, you want to build it with AI, and you want to ship it fast, right? That's the opportunity today in 2026. All right, so let's start building. So, today I want to kind of lay out the

[2:44] groundworks, uh the tools and the frameworks that we're going to be using today to build this mobile application. And this might sound a bit technical at first, but I promise it's going to be very easy to understand as you follow along. Now, we're going to use Cloud Code to build the entire thing. But there's a couple of more tools that we're going to be needing to put everything together. But first, you want

[3:01] to think about Claude as your architect. So, for example, if you're building a home, Claude will be your architect and your builder, right? You describe the house that you want in plain English, right? I want a front door, I want three bedrooms, I want a kitchen, and the architect will design and build the house completely for you, right? You never have to pick up any tools. Claude

[3:19] is going to do all the heavy lifting. Now, since we're building a coin app today, we're going to be using an AI to power the app, right? Cuz when you take pictures of coin, you want an AI tool basically to analyze it and come back with analysis, right? So, you're going to use an API for this. Now, you can

[3:34] either use Claude API or OpenAI's API. Both are actually as good, but to be honest with you, OpenAI is actually a lot cheaper to use. But for the purpose of this demo, I'm going to use Claude cuz I already have credits with Claude. But both of them work the same way. Now, we're also going to use React Native here to build the app. So, think of this as the building materials, right? If you're building a house, think of it as the timber, the concrete, the wiring of the house. And when you're building an app, this is what makes every interaction on the app work, right? So,

[4:03] when you tap a button, something happens or you swipe between pages, that's all React Native. It handles all the basic mechanics on how the app feels and responds. Now, the final thing here is Expo. Expo actually allows you to test the app on your physical phone. So, I'm going to show you how to do this as well. So, whatever you've built, you can actually test it live on your phone. By the way, if you like these ideas, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg cuz I'm always digging into new business ideas, especially things that you can build using AI that makes money. But honestly, I can't turn every single idea

[4:33] into a YouTube video. So, a lot of the best ideas don't make it to the channel, but they go straight to my newsletter instead. This is where I track and share fresh business ideas, ideas that are already making people money. So, if you want to be the first to know about these before they go mainstream, join my free newsletter. It's completely free, link down below. All right, so let's start building. So, first step you want to do is you want to download the Claude desktop app. And basically, you have the option here to choose between chat, um co-work, and also code. Now, you can also use Claude co-work for this, but I

[5:04] do like to use Claude Code cuz I just think that it's more customizable, it's more capable than co-work, but they're basically the same thing. Now, the second step is you want to set up a folder, right? So, let me close this here. And if you look down here, you're going to see that this is connected to a folder on my desktop computer. So, if you're opening this for the first time,

[5:22] you probably won't have anything here. So, what you want to do is just click here and open folder and just select a folder that you want Claude Code to access. And you're going to want this because you want to keep all the files that it's creating in one place so that it's easy for you to grab everything once you're ready to publish. So, you want to keep it organized, and I'm just going to click this one, hit open, and it's connected. Now, down here, you have options to actually pick the model, right? So, Claude has three different models, Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. So, Opus is the smartest one, but it will

[5:53] take the most amount of tokens. Now, it really depends on what kind of project that you're working with. If you're trying to build something super complicated, I would use Opus 4.7 to kind of plan out the app. Or maybe if you built something and there are errors that Sonnet can't solve, then I would probably switch to Opus. But for this project, I think it's a very simple coin app that we're building, Sonnet 4.6 is more than capable of doing this. So, you want to start with this cuz you get to save some tokens, right? Now, Haiku, sometimes I use this for simple tasks like doing research on the web or just

[6:25] summarizing information or just pulling data from other sources. Something that don't require a lot of reasoning, I would pick Haiku because again, this is going to be the cheapest model to use. And if you notice here as well, with within each model, you get to pick the work. Now, for this entire app, I kept it as Sonnet 4.6 and as medium, and I was able to get really good results. So, let's keep it as Sonnet with medium, and I just want you guys to know that you do have options. If you run into an error that you couldn't solve, you can always

[6:51] change it to Opus for more brain power. So, this is the app that we're trying to build. So, you always want to plan out the structure of the app. You don't want to just tell Claude, "Hey, can you rebuild this or clone this app for me?" without any detail or context of what you want. It's not going to give you the results that you want. So, always plan it out. Think about the core features of the app, right? And for this example, I'm going to keep it simple. So, if you look at this app here, I notice that there are three primary functions of the app, right? So, number one is the camera

[7:18] function. Obviously, you need this to take a photo of the coin, and you have the AI analyze the coin and gives you a result. Number two, you also going to need a results page to display the analysis from the AI. And number three, you also want to have a dashboard, right? So, the user can maybe create folders and see their collection. And I think this is super important in my cuz you don't want to just have a coin app that does not allow the users to manage their coins cuz people can just go to ChatGPT and take a photo, ask it to

[7:43] analyze it, kind of does the same thing. But if you allow people to manage their coins and maybe even buy and sell with other users, that is a feature that ChatGPT or Claude offers, and it justifies paying a premium or a monthly subscription for your app. Now, obviously, I'm not telling you to just copy this app and publish it to the App Store, but I just want to show you how achievable something like this today versus 10 years ago for somebody who's not technical. All right, so I have the prompt ready. I'm going to paste it here, and I'm going to walk you through what I have here, all right? So, build a

[8:12] UI for coin collector iOS app called Coin Vault using React Native and Expo. Three screens with the bottom navigation. Number one, scan. Full screen camera placeholder, circular viewfinder, capture button, and results card showing coin name, country, year, estimated value range, and rarity badge. Number two, I want the collection page, a grid of six to eight mock coins, each with circular photo placeholder, coin name, and value. Dashboard, a total collection value displayed prominently, a donut chart breakdown by country. In design, I want this to be a dark background, gold accents. Think of premium collector vault like a finance app for coins. Give me a complete project I can run and preview in a web

[8:50] browser on localhost. So, basically, what I want here is I want it to give me the mock-up that I can view on my Google Chrome browser. Now, if you notice, I didn't actually write all this. So, I actually went to Claude chat and I actually pasted the link to this app and told it that, "Hey, I want to create a similar app like this. Tell me the features that I should have on this app and give me the exact prompt that I can copy and paste into Claude Code." It's going to give you a more detailed prompt than if you were to write the prompt yourself. This, you know, grid of six to

[9:18] eight mock coins, each with circular photo placeholder, coin name, I wouldn't know how to write that. But if you give it to Claude chat and ask it to write out the entire prompt, it will actually be quite detailed, and this is exactly what you want. So, let's see what it's able to do with this simple prompt. I'm just going to hit send here, and it's going to start working. And in a few minutes, this is what you get. So, so I'm going to zoom out so you can see better. Looks like we've got three different tabs in the navigation. We've got the page for the scan. We've got a

[9:43] collection page, like all of this is scrollable. And also, we've got the dashboard where it gives you the estimated value of your coins. Nice. I think this is great for the first version. Of course, if you're noticing here that the icons are not visible here, it's kind of broken, so I can easily go back to Claude and ask it to fix it. But before I do that, I just want to say that I think the design looks fine. It's not amazing, but with just one prompt, I think it's quite

[10:05] impressive in what it's able to achieve. Now, if you have a specific design in mind, you can feed it to Claude and ask it to adjust it to your liking. So, to get some design inspiration, I like to usually go to Dribbble here. So, in Dribbble, if you search for iOS apps, and you can do this for websites as well, by the way, um you will find that there's a lot of already nice-looking designs. Basically, for any category that you're thinking of getting into. I think all of these look amazing, and I actually found this one that's pretty interesting. It look quite nice for the coin app that we're building. So, it

[10:35] doesn't look the same with this. So, if you find something that you like, you can just right click, save the image to the folder that Claude has access to, and just save it here. So, you can go back to Claude, and if you look to the right-hand corner here, click on this button here, and you can select files, and try to look for that reference image that you just saved, which is going to be under assets. And this is the file that you want. So, you just want to right click on this one, and you want to attach as context, and it's going to populate here. And what we want to say

[11:03] here is just basically extract the design elements of this screenshot, including the colors of the dashboard buttons, how the buttons look, the contrast between colors, how each UI element looks on the screenshot. I want you to revise the mock-up that you created previously and apply this design for our mobile app, and hit enter. And it's going to work its thing, and just give it a couple minutes, and we'll be back for the result. All right, so it looks like it's done. This is the updated version with the new design, and if you compare it to this one, that's what it looks like. I think it's a lot

[11:30] better, a lot cleaner. It didn't change any of the positions of the buttons and the elements. It just changed the design. And surprisingly, it also fixed the icons on the bottom here without me asking it to do it. So, that's pretty sweet. So, if I go to collection, has this design now, and then the scan page looks like this. Now, if you guys have the new desktop app, there's one cool thing that you can do. If you right click on this icon here, and you hit preview, you can actually see the preview right on Claude Code. So, you don't have to switch between Claude Code and Google Chrome. But one limitation is

[12:01] that it is huge, right? But it does allow you to see everything on one screen, and what I like about this is that if you want to change certain elements, if you hit this cursor icon here, and you just hover your mouse over these elements, and let's say you want to change something, right? Let's say you want to change this to green, you can just select that, and it will populate here, and then you can just ask

[12:22] it to maybe change the color to green. Hit enter. So, you don't have to keep going back and forth Google Chrome, and then take a screenshot of it, upload it here. That's going to waste a lot of tokens. So, I think this is an easy and quick way to make changes. Now, I'm going to refresh this, and it just changed it to green. All right, so now once you're happy with the design, you want to add some functionality for the app, right? So, primary function of this app is to be able to take a photo and have the AI analyze it and give you back some results. So, in order to do that,

[12:53] you're going to need API keys for whatever LLM that you want to use. So, I'm going to use Claude's API for this cuz I already have some credits. But like I said before, you can use OpenAI as well. So, I did some calculation here, and if you're wondering how much it will cost whenever a user takes a photo and analyze one coin, it is actually very, very cheap. So, I want you to focus on the third line here, the estimated cost per scan. So, if you go with Sonnet 4.6, it's .009. So, this is like less than 1 cent to analyze one photo. But if you go with OpenAI, it's

[13:23] even cheaper. It's almost half the price. It's .005. And if you do 1,000 scans, which is pretty crazy, it only cost you $5. So, you have a lot of margins there depending on how much you charge the customer on a monthly basis. But of course, you want to give it a limit. I don't think anybody's going to do 1,000 scans, but um that is just the pricing that you should be aware of whenever you build apps that needs an API connection to an LLM. And again, you

[13:46] don't have to calculate this manually. You can just ask Claude to, "Hey, give me a calculation. Which one's the cheapest API for this purpose? Give me a cost breakdown." Things like that. You don't have to do it manually. The AI will calculate everything. So, I'm going to go back to Claude, and I'm going to ask it this prompt. All right, I want to build the camera function. I want to use Claude API to analyze the coins. Please

[14:06] guide me how to do it. So, hit enter. All right, so it did ask me if I have Node.js installed. So, I do have this installed already. But if you're doing this for the first time, you might have to install this once. And if you don't know how to do it, you can just ask it to guide you through every step. It's very, very simple. So, I just say, "Yes, it's installed. Do you have an Anthropic API key? If yes, we're ready to create the backend server." All right, I do have that. Can just now go to this website here. It's Claude console. So, the URL is platform.claude.com,

[14:35] and you can just log into account, and if you go down here under API keys, you will see all the API keys that you have. And obviously, it's going to be blank if you're doing this for the first time. So, what you want to do here is you want to create a key, and then you can name your secret key. Maybe you can call it

[14:50] coin app. Hit add, and then it's going to give you the key where you can just copy it and give it to Claude. Now, one thing that you don't want to do is type in your API key here because if this chat gets leaked and somebody else has access to your API key, you're going to be paying for that. So, what you want to ask Claude to do is actually to create an .env file, which is an environment file, and place it in that folder, and you want to paste in your API key in that file. This way, it's not out in the open, but it's in the environment file

[15:19] that only Claude can access. So, you can say, "Create an .env file so I can paste in my API key." So, I'm just going to click on this .env file and hit edit, and then I'm going to just paste it here and hit save. And then you can click done. All right, so it asked me to install this. Now, what you can do as well is you can also say, "Please run the

[15:44] command for me." And it is working now. It's adding all the functionality for the camera, and I'm going to come back when it's done. All right, so it looks like it's done. The camera is working, and it's asking me to open the the app in Google Chrome again. But I don't want to do that cuz I want it to actually test it on my phone. And to do that, because it's not published on the App Store, we have to use a third-party app called Expo Go. So, I'm going to say, "I want to test this on my phone

[16:13] using Expo Go. Please guide." All right, now it is done. That took a few minutes. So, so everything's running correctly. Both servers are running. Here's how to test it on your phone. So, install Expo Go on your iPhone from the App Store. So, if you guys are wondering, the app looks like this. So,

[16:30] simply just install this on your iPhone. Make sure it's connected to Wi-Fi, and then you want to open this URL. Now, actually, there's an easier method here. You can actually just scan a barcode from your phone, and it should open the app. So, I'm going to ask it to, "I want to scan a barcode instead." All right, cool. So, it gave me a barcode instead. So, this is a lot easier for me to do instead of typing the URL manually. So, what you want to do now is you want to make sure that you just download this Expo Go app on your iPhone first. And then what you want to

[17:02] do is is that you just want to take a picture of this barcode here, and then hit that yellow thing. There you go. So, what you're seeing here is my iPhone. I can go to collection, and I can scroll down. Obviously, this is mock data. So, you have to build the functionality of this to allow you to click between all these elements. But what I really want to test is this scan feature, right? So, if I click on scan here, grant permission, hit allow. Now, I don't really have a physical coin to show this to you. So, I have a picture here that I found on

[17:35] Google. Let's just test this out, and let's put the coin right in the center here, and hit on scan coin. Hm, server error 500. Okay, so this is good that it's doing this now. So, let's try to troubleshoot this with Claude. So, I'm going to go back to Claude and just say that when I try to scan a coin,

[17:53] it gave me an error, server error 500. Hit enter. So, it's going to go back and check everything. So, let's scan the coin again, and I'm going to hit start analyzing. All right, so it works. It's got the name of the coin, where it's from, condition, very fine, composition, and everything. And if you guys are wondering, the error was because of the API key. It wasn't able to locate the API key in the .env. So, it was able to make some changes by itself, and it just asked me to restart

[18:23] everything, and it's now working well. And again, you can always redesign this page as well to whatever you like. For example, I don't like the fact that there's no commas in the dollar figure here. I think it's very confusing. But yeah, considering that I didn't give it any direction, I think it did pretty good job. Now, if I check the actual name here, I just want to make sure that

[18:42] the name is correct. So, Aureus 41 BC. Yeah. So, of course, the estimated value is not going to be the same. It's just an estimation, but at least it got the name correct and the time period. All right, so now that you have completed the mobile app, let's say you're happy with the results, the next step is to get it ready to publish to the App Store. Now, before you publish anything, you want to make sure that you have things like authentication, which allows users to log in, and you want to have a database, and you want to have the ability to take payments. Now, I can't

[19:10] fit every single thing in this video cuz otherwise, it's going to be a super long video. I just wanted to show you guys how I was able to build basic app with Claude Code. But if you really want to publish this to the App Store, you do want to have all these things figured out. So, I've set up a free resource here. You can just grab it. So, you'll find things like how to do authentication, what tools you're going to need, what to use for storage, for payments, and some of the things that's required by Apple, like privacy policy here and the app icon, onboarding screen, things like this. And you can

[19:38] even feed all this page to Claude and ask it to guide you through every single step. So, you guys you can download this for free down below in the description. Now, if you guys are new to this, all of this might sound complicated, especially when you're building apps to publish to the App Store cuz there's just an extra layer of complexity because there's so many rules that you have to follow just because you're working with Apple, right? But the good news is that mobile apps are not the only thing that you can build to make money cuz you can also build web applications or even Chrome

[20:05] extensions and you don't need to submit this to the App Store and it's a lot easier to build and ship. And you know, most people actually overlook this Chrome extensions cuz some of these tiny Chrome extensions are making a lot of money. And I actually recently made a video about how I rebuilt a Chrome extension that's making $120,000 a year using Cloud Code in just 10 minutes. So if you want to watch that video, click

[20:26] here and I'll see you there.

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