Mark Moss spent $25,000 building a basic e-commerce site in 2001 because there were no Shopify or Stripe. Every piece had to be custom-built and maintained in-house. Today the same site takes minutes.
Around 2001, I built an internet company. I spent about $25,000 just to build what today would be like an incredibly basic e-commerce site because there was no Shopify, right? Nothing like that. There wasn't an app full of stores that I could just get plugins. There was no Stripe sitting there, you know, ready to accept my payments. Nothing like that. Everything had to be custom built. It had to be integrated. It had to be hosted. We had to host our own websites, had to be maintained. And then, and then even after you spent all that money getting the site online, you still had to convince people to trust buying something through a computer. Now today, I could vibe code something more capable in probably a couple of minutes than what it took to get back then.
