Monetizing AI in Software Creation

Summary

AI Hustle: Make Money with AI

Episode Title: Monetizing AI in Software Creation

Hosts: Jaeden Schafer & Jamie McCauley
Date: June 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This week’s episode dives into the economics and practicality of developing and monetizing software with artificial intelligence. Jaeden and Jamie dissect new payment changes for major AI coding tools, discuss the real-world productivity and costs of building software with AI, and explore how these developments impact entrepreneurial ventures—using their own projects and recent experiences as case studies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Changing Economics of AI Developer Tools

[01:30-03:50]

• GitHub Copilot Pricing Shift:
  • Formerly, developers could use Copilot at a subsidized flat rate ($29–$50/month).
  • As of June 1, 2026, Microsoft has moved to pure API-based billing, causing monthly costs to soar to $750–$3,000 for high-usage developers.
  • Jaeden’s Reaction:
    • “I am so fired up about this. Jamie's laughing at me. But I have been telling everybody about this to the point where... I made a satirical post about this on LinkedIn that got me on the front page of Reddit’s LinkedIn Lunatics.” (02:33)
    • He jokes about running multiple Claude Max subscriptions, triggering LinkedIn commenters, and clarifies you only need to log out/log in—not buy extra laptops.

2. Real-World Token Costs and Project Scale

[03:50-06:53]

• Jaeden’s Massive Bible Study App Project:

  • Building in-depth, chapter-specific study guides for every chapter in the Bible (including the Apocrypha), plus child-friendly versions and research-backed resources.
  • Uses APIs to fetch open-source art (e.g. from The Met) and indexes over 7,500 images.
  • “It is a massive, gnarly project... crunches tokens because of how intense it is.” (05:05)
  • To finish the project efficiently, he’s running two Claude Max subscriptions this month to avoid hitting token limits, since he’s collaborating with his wife and studio manager.

• Self Pause App Rebuild:

  • Jaeden's wife rebuilt their first app, burning through many tokens.
  • The team effort means a single Claude Max subscription no longer sufficed.

3. Token Waste: Debugging and AI Limitations

[06:53-08:39]

• Debugging Overhead:
  • Developers rely on AI tools but much of their token spend goes into debugging buggy/inaccurate AI code.
  • Jamie describes his project scraping local businesses and automating personalized outreach, only to discover costs ballooning when enriching data with AI-powered audits:
    • “Token usage for those APIs... pulling all that data for each automated email is like a crazy amount... 10 times more expensive than just pulling their name and email.” (07:34–07:50)
    • As a self-described “vibe coder,” Jamie expresses surprise at these hidden costs.

4. Productivity Gains vs. Skepticism

[08:39-12:17]

• “Are AI Productivity Gains Overblown?”

  • Jaeden counters recent claims (citing a CFO of a major tech company) suggesting AI productivity increases aren’t matched by growth in revenue or output.
    • “Are you kidding me? I just rebuilt an entire app from scratch that used to have bugs and published it and it makes me real money... I’m making money every single month from that now.” (09:32–09:44)
    • Highlights:
      • Launched numerous platforms powered by AI.
      • Podcast studio website tripled revenue after Jamie rebuilt it with AI.
      • Secured bigger clients (e.g. NerdWallet) because of improved professional web presence.
      • Developed a tool to run a network of sleep history podcasts, generating passive revenue.
    • Historic pain points—feature limitations, slow development, high costs—have been eliminated by AI.

• Jaeden’s New Way of Working:

  • In building the Self Pause app, he transitioned from iOS-only to auto-generating a fully-featured web app through Claude, enabling cross-platform growth overnight.
  • “Something really cool I just did... I actually, we built the iOS app and so I just went to Claude and was like, hey, build a web app... we never had that before." (11:21–11:41)

5. Price Projections and Strategic “Hustle”

[12:17-14:53]

• Both hosts agree: While AI tool prices may rise, the ROI is still compelling for hustlers—speed and market capture matter more than incremental price increases right now.
• Jaeden’s Calculation on Claude’s Subsidy:
  • Based on his token usage and API costs, Claude might be subsidizing up to $11,000/month for users maxing out their limits—this level of support can’t last forever.
    • “According to my math, that triggered a lot of people, potentially $11,000 a month if you’re fully using your ClaudeMax tokens.” (13:47)
    • Doubled usage limits came after Anthropic’s (Claude’s parent company) new data center contracts.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I have a Bible study app. I’m making these really in-depth, 20-minute long Bible study guides for every single chapter in the Bible, plus the Apocrypha... There’s over 7,500 images that I’ve sourced and indexed. It absolutely crunches tokens.”
  — Jaeden, [04:15]

• “Developers are refusing right now to work without AI, but there’s new data questioning the productivity gains... That line, the ‘data questions AI productivity gains,’ just, I am so triggered by it...”
  — Jaeden, [08:39–09:52]

• “When our website was just mediocre, none of those people were booking. As soon as we completely redid it, [with AI] we have huge organizations renting it out for the day.”
  — Jaeden, [10:36]

• “Speed really is a factor right now... anyone aware of AI’s capabilities is trying to build as much as they can. I’m just trying to get all my projects pushed through as soon as possible.”
  — Jaeden, [14:53]

• “Token usage for those APIs and pulling all that data for each automated email is like a crazy amount... 10 times more expensive than just pulling their name and email.”
  — Jamie, [07:34–07:50]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:30 — GitHub Copilot pricing changes and cost realities
• 03:50 — Jaeden’s Bible app project & token logistics
• 06:53 — Debugging, “vibe coding,” and real cost for non-coders
• 08:39 — Productivity: skepticism vs. real-life business growth
• 10:36 — How AI-built sites bring higher-paying clients
• 11:21 — Instant web app generation expands business reach
• 13:47 — Claude Max math: hidden subsidies and the race to build
• 14:53 — Strategic hustle: maximizing output before price hikes

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Tone & Style

The hosts are energetic, candid, and humorous, often taking a meta-perspective on the “hustle” behind AI entrepreneurship. The vibe is practical and motivating—rooted in gritty first-hand stories, transparent cost breakdowns, and a drive to turn AI-powered tools into active income streams.

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Summary Takeaway

The true winners in the current AI landscape are those who move fast and maximize output before inevitable price hikes set in. Both Jaeden and Jamie emphasize strategic resourcefulness—splitting accounts, wringing every feature from current plans, and rapidly building and monetizing AI-driven tools. The upshot: while the cost of developing with AI is climbing, the scope for value creation (and hustle!) remains massive for those willing to experiment, debug, and deploy at breakneck speed.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host 1]

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have an interesting topic. Developers are refusing now to work without AI because it makes it so much easier to code. But there's some new data out that says actually a lot of your tokens that they're spending on development are going to debugging the software. So it is buggy. If you've ever made something before, you know that sometimes, a lot of times things don't work right away and it has to go back and solve the problem. Especially those of us who are pure vibe coders who don't have any coding experience. But this is a valid point about the debugging and the token cost. We're going to get into all the economics today. But before we do, Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community?

[Podcast Host 2 (Jaden)]

Yeah. Every single week we record a bonus video over on our school community. This week is actually really cool because Jamie got access to chat GPT's ads. So like putting ads inside of Chat GPT and he has run some ads in there. He has some results and some analytics for his business that he's showing. He shows you how much it costs, how to get it set up, how to do the targeting, what the inside of the platform looks like. If you are doing any sort of business online and this is something that's interesting to you, you're going to want to check this, this video out. It is absolutely fascinating how ChatGPT is running their ad program and also there is like almost a hundred other videos or maybe like 50 other videos in there breaking down all of the tools, tricks, strategies, numbers, all the inside stuff we don't share anywhere else. So go check out the AI hustle school community. It's only $19 a month. We have 300 members in there. It is a good time, let me tell you. So yeah, go check it out. Let's link is in the description. Okay. Let's talk about what's going on. I am very fired up about this topic in particular. So GitHub Copilot, they used to have subsidized billing, basically like. Like what Claude has, so you could pay a flat rate of $29 to $50 a month. And they're saying on June 1, which is today, that is switching. So no longer will they. Will you be able to get those flat rates. Now you're gonna have to pay with the API. Now why are they doing that? Because they're losing a ton of money on this. But it's Microsoft, so, like, shouldn't they try to lose money to get developers? That's the question you're asking. And the answer is evidently not. They don't want to take the hit anymore because for what you used to be able to pay $30 a month to $50 a month for developers are now, if they're paying just the raw API, they're paying 750 to $3,000 a month. Guys, I am so fired up about this. Jamie's laughing at me. But I have been telling everybody about this to the point where I kind of make. I made a satirical post about this on LinkedIn that got me on the front page of Reddit's LinkedIn lunatics. Which in my post, I was joking, but I said I got a second laptop to run a second cloud max subscription. And everyone's like, whoa, why don't you use a virtual machine? Which is probably maybe a good point or something. The reality of this situation is you don't need a second laptop to get a second cloud max subscription. You can just log out of one and log into another, which to trigger many people is actually what I did yesterday. For the first time ever, I essentially have two cloud max subscriptions.

[Podcast Host 1]

So you're now running two Claude subscriptions, which is pretty intense. I recently just started my first cloud max subscription. What types of tasks are you doing that are taking so many tokens, if I may ask?

[Podcast Host 2 (Jaden)]

Yeah, so to be fair, it's not something that I plan on doing long term. I'm just doing it for one month because I have a bunch of tasks that just burnt through my tokens super fast. And I don't. And like, it's like, basically I'm blocked out till Wednesday. So I'm blocked out for three days, Monday, Tuesday, end of Wednesday, and I'm like, okay, if I could burn through all my tokens in four days, I'm just going to get another account. And for this month, I'll Tag team, back and forth. The big projects that I've been working on is I probably talked about this before on the podcast, but I have a Bible study app that I'm writing. It is I'm making these really in depth, 20 minute long Bible study guides for every single chapter in the Bible study. There are 13, somewhere between a thousand and 1300 chapters in the Bible. And I'm like adding some of like the Apocrypha. I'm not Catholic, but Catholics have the Apocrypha in their Bible, so I'm trying to make it for them too. Shout out to all you Catholics, my Bible app loves you. And so anyways, there is a lot of chapters in this and there's really in depth study guides. And in addition to that, the study guides, I'm like, I don't want it to just be like general AI kind of generated stuff. So I'm like, hey, go do some like deep research on every single topic. Go add like resources and links to archaeological evidence for all of this stuff. Go find open source images. I had to scrape like the Met has like an API where you can embed all of the famous art from, you know, people for the last a thousand, two thousand years that have painted of stuff in the Bible in cathedrals and stuff. It's all kind of like open source, publicly available. But I grabbed all of those kind of libraries and I'm embedding images from, you know, if someone like painted John the Baptist, it's getting embedded into the Bible study with John the Baptist in it. So anyways, it is a massive, gnarly project. There's over 7500 images that I've sourced and indexed. There is 1200 chapters that I've written. I've written adult chapters, I've written children's study guides. So like you can read it for your kids. Anyways, it is a massive project. It's my Sunday project. I work on it after church on Sunday. So it is. But it's a massive project and it absolutely crunches tokens because of how intense it is. So I have like a hundred other projects going on at the same time, but that one pushes it over the edge every time. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm just getting all the content finished up this month for it. I'll. I'm just going to get two subscriptions because otherwise that was burning through all my tokens and I was getting locked out till Wednesday. Um, in addition, my wife rebuilt our first app we ever made, which is called Self Pause from Scratch in the last two weeks that used up a ton of tokens, but she rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. It's incredible. She's published it, we're waiting for it to get approved. I'll probably tell you more about it when that happens, but we have a lot of projects going on. It's also me and my wife and my studio manager in Arizona. We were all using the same account. It wasn't enough. So is it really me using all the tokens? No, it's like three people. So it was worth splitting it and getting a second account at this point.

[Podcast Host 1]

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, you know, one thing that people are frustrated with when it comes to all the usage tokens and things like that is the fact that AI or that Claudic should say even Claude code does make mistakes. Like sometimes there'll be a bug or an error or in my case, something I'm building right now, I realized. So I'm basically having. I'll just tell you what I'm doing. I'm having Claude scrape local businesses and then I'm pulling a few API tokens from other places to enrich the data. Basically get contact and email information for different business owners in the area. Then I'm going to do an email automation to them that's personalized. Anyways, one of the things I was going to send in that personalized email was a audit to show them where they currently rank when it comes to ChatGPT search or Gemini search. If they show up in AI search results or not, come to find out that the token usage for those APIs and pulling all that data for each automated email is like a crazy amount. So it's like 10, 10 times more expensive than just pulling their name and email and reaching out with a custom message. So doing those extra things I didn't realize as a vibe coder would cost me so much. And so that was a little frustrating. But to get to that point, I also had to spend a lot of tokens back and forth with Claude. So, you know, I don't know. I think for, for someone like me who's not a huge coder, it still comes as a value. But if you maybe are deeper in the space, you know exactly what you want. That I think the mistakes would be maybe frustrating to have to. To pay for, to. To fix them.

[Podcast Host 2 (Jaden)]

Yep, I, I agree with you there. So that brings me to another interesting thing, which is what you started the episode off, which, with which is the article, which is developers are refusing right now to work without AI. And so there's some new data allegedly that is questioning the productivity gains of AI. Okay, I don't know what Galaxy people are on where they're questioning the productivity gains of AI. Actually, I do know what galaxy. Basically it comes from the CFO of Shoot, like Spotify or like some big company, I can't remember. But anyways, there was this thing where they're like, yeah, like our revenue hasn't really gone up that much since we started using AI. So I don't know if it's like really justifiable. Okay, that's, that's like where a lot of this happens. But other than that, the productivity gains. Are you kidding me? I just rebuilt an entire app from scratch that used to have bugs and published it and it makes me real money every month. So that's going to be a big bump. I've been able to launch tons of platforms. I've been able to run like all of my businesses I've made meaningful revenue from. I have an entire podcast network of sleep history podcasts that I was able to build a tool that can automatically run that. I'm making money every single month from that now. I should do a whole probably a school community episode on that. But anyways, there are, there's a thousand things that I'm doing right now and all of them are making either my businesses. Oh my gosh. Jamie rebuilt with Search Saddle my entire business for my podcast studio AZ.com I have a podcast studio, just a local brick and brick and mortar or whatever. That business. I am not joking, has tripled its revenue at least since Jamie rebuilt the entire website using he used lovable for the design. But it's actually just self hosted. But since we used AI to rebuild it. It used to be on WordPress. It wasn't. I'm pretty good at WordPress. I've done it for almost 10 years now. It, it was like okay website but it wasn't like premium. Jamie rebuilt it with AI so it looks incredible and premium. And I am not joking. We're working with like we have like nerd wallet recording at our studio now. We have like massive organizations, huge companies that never. That never worked with us before paying, you know, they'll rent the whole thing out for the whole day. They don't really like money that isn't really what they're. They're concerned about. I promise you none of those people were booking when our website was just mediocre as soon as we completely redid it. So I'm seeing revenue on every Business basically grow, improve new things. I was never able to do get fixed features. I was never able to create. Oh, I mean, okay, I'll stop rambling in like a second. But something else I'm really stoked about is for Self Pause. That was my very first positive affirmation meditation app. We grew it to 150,000 users. My wife and I started that. We always had the problem that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on development and we always had the problem that it was like we basically the developers had a bandwidth issue and it was a price issue. We just couldn't put all the features in. There was bugs a lot of times that we couldn't get fixed. It's just an expensive business. And now that it's AI is really cheap, we've been able to completely revamp it. We'll probably do a relaunch once it's rebuilt and you'll hear me plug in on the podcast more. But something really cool I just did with it in the last three days is I actually we built the iOS app and so I just went to Claude and was like, hey, build a web app. So like if someone goes to selfpaws.com its website, they get all of the features of the app, like all of the self recorded affirmations, like the meditations, like the soundscape, like, like all the features. We never had that before. And so anyways, businesses are upgraded. I am so triggered by the data is qu. The data questions the productivity gains line. But otherwise, yeah, I'm pretty stoked about what you could do with AI right now.

[Podcast Host 1]

Yeah, I mean I think there's, I think the pushback overall is just coming from the way, the back and forth of, you know, okay, are these layoffs from these big corporations, is that due to AI and coding or is that the overall economy? People are just worried about that. And so I think they're, I mean it is important that everyone's trying to actually figure out the true value of AI here. But like you said, even at two Claude Max subscriptions, you're able to make so much more money and do so much more. I mean before you had all these virtual assistants and all this slowness to develop and to grow and now it's so fast, streamlined, better, cheaper. So like, yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. I don't really see the, you know, even if, if Claude Max went up and doubled, you know, in the short term, I think it still is well worth it. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see where the Price ends up staying long term. So I don't know.

[Podcast Host 2 (Jaden)]

Yes, yeah, that's true. I think that Claude and everyone else is going to have to actually raise their prices at some point. I think they're just trying to absolutely absorb as much of the market as they can. They're making a lot of money. So I think that's probably where Anthropic is at. However, I'm just going to try to get as much code and as much stuff built and done like as soon as possible. That's why I'm like, not like, I'll just wait till my, you know, my rate limit runs out on Wednesday. I'm like, nope, buying another cloud max subscription. I'm just trying to get all my projects pushed through. I don't know when their IPO happens. I don't know if that means they're going to be more serious about trying to generate revenue. Because right now Claude is subsidizing potentially, according to my math, that triggered a lot of people, potentially $11,000 a month if you're fully using your ClodMax tokens. That comes from. It used to be like half of that, but then they said they doubled the, they doubled your usage limits when they signed the SpaceX Colossus 1 data center contract. It's really hard though, because they don't always tell you exactly like how many tokens you're getting. But from my experiment. So basically when I last time when I first ran into this problem where I ran out for a day of my tokens and they were like, okay, you're like, you know, you locked out for a day. I was like, okay, fine, whatever, I'll just buy some tokens because you can, you can just pay the API directly. I paid $200 and I use that in one day. So I'm like, okay, $200 a day times 30 days a month times they just doubled the rate limits. That probably gets me somewhere around 11 grand. Don't double check my math, but I think it's something like that.

[Podcast Host 1]

Crazy. Well, yeah, I mean like you said, speed really is, is a factor right now. And I think anyone who is aware of the capabilities of AI is trying to build as much as they can. So if you guys are building, we'd love to have you again be a part of our school community. It's a great place of like minded people. And don't forget to leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening. Those really help us out a lot. We just passed 100 reviews and we're trying to get to 200 now, so if you could help us with that goal, that would be awesome. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

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