Show HN: I Spent $300 Learning That Replit Has SSH Support

NY times has a popular rent vs buy calculator (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...) However, it is gated by the paywall so I decided to vibecode my own using Replit.

Replit made it super easy for me as a non-developer to deploy the application. However I quickly learned that Replit is quite expensive during the iteration phase. A typical bug fix or design change would cost about 1min of work and $.50. This quickly added up to a bill of about $300 for the month. It took me too long to learn that Replit supports SSH to VS Code so I am now using the Claude extension from VS code for all the changes. I do still use Replit for hosting and deployment but I don't exceed what is included in the monthly cost ($25).

The site I built: https://housecalculators.com/rent-vs-buy-calculator