No employees. No agency. No funding. One founder in Omaha, one AI named Fable, and about $5 a month of infrastructure. This page is the receipts — every step, every dollar, every mistake, updated as we go.
Friday afternoon to Saturday morning, July 17–18, 2026.
Streaming subscriptions idle 8–10 months a year while shows are out of season. Pitch: an app that toggles your subscriptions around your watchlist. Instruction to the AI: validate it — and if it passes, we build.
Market research: 23% of US streamers already rotate subscriptions by hand; manual rotators save $600–900/yr. Competitive gap confirmed — nobody owns content-aware rotation. Verdict: go.
Full product spec, three pricing tiers, AWS architecture, 10-week MVP plan.
Landing page, waitlist API, CDN, DNS, TLS — serving production traffic ~75 minutes after the spec was approved.
Every signup becomes a CRM contact and a pipeline opportunity. GA4/GTM provisioned by API. Not without casualties — see the mistakes section.
Push-to-deploy pipeline with smoke tests, security headers, email-spoofing protection on the domain. First pipeline run: green in 51 seconds.
Stripe subscriptions live: three tiers plus a founding membership at $59.99/yr, price-locked for life. A simulated customer's full lifecycle — subscribe, pay, cancel — verified end to end.
bingi.me/calculator — see what your own idle months cost. Plus a referral loop: 3 friends join, you get a year free.
Sending, receiving, and a branded 3-email welcome sequence — built on AWS for ~$0/mo instead of another SaaS subscription.
The AI signs up a test address, and the automated welcome email loops back through our own mail pipeline where the AI reads and verifies it. Land → calculate → join → nurture → checkout: fully automated, zero humans required.
What it actually costs — and what it would cost you to repeat it.
| Our new monthly burn | |
|---|---|
| AWS — site, API, database, email, DNS | ~$3–6/mo |
| Domain (bingi.me) | ~$25/yr |
| Payments (Stripe) | $0 fixed — 2.9% + 30¢ per sale |
| Analytics (GA4/GTM), GitHub, CI/CD | $0 |
The honest part — what we inherited (and what replacing it costs a stranger):
| Inherited asset | Replication cost |
|---|---|
| CRM + marketing automation subscription (agency account) | $97–297/mo, or free-tier substitutes + elbow grease |
| AI teammate (Claude subscription — this is Fable) | ~$100–200/mo — the single most load-bearing line item |
| An existing inbox to forward into | $0 — any Gmail works |
| Years of internal playbooks (deploy standards, integration templates) | The AI regenerates most of it on demand |
| Total to repeat this | ≈ $130–250/mo + a weekend |
Every build log that has no failures is lying. Ours, in order:
Secure config lookups kept insisting parameters didn't exist — they did. The culprit was the local shell silently rewriting paths before AWS ever saw them. Lesson: when your infrastructure seems to lie, suspect your own tools first.
Our CRM's tokens lock their permissions at the moment they're created — updating permissions in the dashboard does nothing for existing tokens. Thirty minutes of confusion, fixed by rotating the key.
Our first analytics property was accidentally provisioned under a sibling brand's account. Deleted, corporate structure decided properly, re-provisioned. Lesson: decide where things live before creating them.
Payment processing has a 30¢ minimum per charge — which is ~20% of a $1.99 subscription. We repriced the same evening to annual-first billing. Lesson: run the fee math before you publish prices.
A Windows console couldn't print 🍿 in a success message and took the script down with it. The popcorn is load-bearing brand. The console lost.
The entire org chart:
Omaha, Nebraska. Runs Marigold ONE11, a one-person digital studio. Sets direction, makes the calls, owns the mistakes and the wins. Yes, he's on the waitlist for his own product — #1.
Anthropic's Claude (Fable 5), working in Claude Code. Research, architecture, code, infrastructure, integrations, copywriting, QA, and this page. Doesn't sleep, which explains the 5 AM commits.
The app ships to private beta Fall 2026. The waitlist gets it first, in order.
Join the waitlist 👑 Become a founding memberBingi is what happens when one founder and one AI take a weekend seriously.
The studio behind Bingi helps people launch like this.
Last updated July 18, 2026 · Generated from the build log — updated at every milestone.