alt Hacker NewsOnce he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS?
The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
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I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free.
Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.
So, he's non-technical. He hasn't written a line of code. I don't know the details of how he hosts or deploys the sites, but I'd likely guarantee that he asked whatever AI he uses and it just walked him through the process of getting one hosted, then he has replicated that.
I mean, for a 12 year old, $200 and not having to do any more work in the future might be a good deal, and for a business, a $200 one-time probably seems like a steal. I agree that there might be long-term issues for them if they don't know how to maintain them, but what are they going to do, sue the 12 year old?
It might just be static site hosting for businesses that want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do it.