Built to answer one question: how much does China actually cost?
China is one of the most remarkable places to travel — vast, affordable, and largely misunderstood by foreign visitors when it comes to cost. Guidebook figures are years out of date. OTA prices don't reflect realistic routing. We built 1000usdinchina to give every traveler a honest, data-driven answer before they book.
I woke up with a clear picture of what this tool should be. I reached for my laptop and spent the rest of the night writing the product specification.
Research, routing logic, data architecture, and a working prototype. Which cities to cover, which prices to source, how to model a budget across hotels, food, transport, and attractions — all mapped out before a single line of production code was written.
Frontend, backend, ETL pipelines, DevOps — the full stack, built in ten days using Claude Code and Claude Design as development partners throughout. Every component designed, tested, and deployed.
No team. No funding. One clear problem, modern AI tools, and fifteen days from a midnight idea to a product used by real travelers.
Claude Code handled the engineering — architecture, implementation, testing, and deployment. Claude Design shaped the visual language. The data comes from real sources: 443,000+ hotel listings across 67 cities, aggregated restaurant pricing from 60 cities, and real HSR and domestic flight fares.