For the price of a cup of milk tea, you can hire someone to develop a custom AI app? This sounds like a fairy tale, but it has become a new way for many young people to make money on platforms like Xianyu and Xiaohongshu.
Reporters recently found that around apps like Lingguang, a group of ordinary people without programming backgrounds are becoming "digital sole proprietors," turning their life experiences into small businesses. Here, there is no development fee that runs into thousands of yuan, just down-to-earth "hand-crafted services": 5 yuan to fix bugs, 8 yuan for optimization suggestions, 19.9 yuan for full-process customization, and some sellers even sell "personal growth tracking" apps with monthly sales of nearly a thousand units... This kind of "hand-crafted app" side hustle is on the rise.
On multiple platforms, many sellers offer related services for "Lingguang Flash Apps": some help customers generate flash apps, some provide debugging, bug fixing, and optimization services, while others sell tutorials and prompt templates, teaching beginners how to use AI to create apps. Prices are generally affordable, ranging from a few yuan to dozens of yuan.
In some product detail pages, sellers have shown a variety of small tools generated using the Lingguang App: there's a "Growth Footprint" app for recording a baby's growth, a "Savings Assistant" to help control home renovation budgets, and a "Homework Checker" for students. These apps are mostly created by ordinary people. Many sellers don't know coding, but through continuous trial and error with AI tools, they can quickly turn their ideas into products by adjusting prompts and structures.
"In the past, making an app required a budget of several ten thousand yuan and a few months of work. Now with AI, as long as you explain your idea, you can make a prototype in a few minutes," said a seller on Xianyu. "It's not about coding skills anymore; it's about who understands users better and offers more thoughtful service."
When AI has lowered the threshold of app development to the extreme, some skills that used to belong to professional programmers have become "micro-skills" for ordinary people. This "one-person company" model requires no investment, no hiring, and its core asset is the seller's precise insight into a specific scenario.
Aside from selling apps directly, selling tutorials and selling prompt words has also become a business.
The reporter saw a tutorial titled "Lingguang Hand-Crafted App from 0 to 1" priced at 9.9 yuan, which claims to include "seven profitable directions" and "100 universal prompt words," and has decent sales. Another product, a "Full-Horse Prompt Word Pack" priced at 6.8 yuan, even promotes itself as "a must-have for self-media to make money." For some young people, instead of doing app orders, "teaching others to make money with AI" has become a more efficient way to monetize.
In this ecosystem, the roles of buyers and sellers are constantly changing: many people first buy tutorials to learn, then switch to offering services. As long as you understand a certain niche scenario better than your customers, even very niche demands like "pet expense calculation" or "Turkish road sign translation" can find buyers in the fragmented market.
Industry professionals believe that AI tools are completely reshaping the way software is created. "In the past, apps were mainly developed by internet companies, but now ordinary people can also participate. AI has made creating apps as simple as typing."
Naturally, behind the craze, there are also some issues, such as low-price competition, uneven service quality, and some tutorials making exaggerated claims. But this also reflects the strong interest of the public in AI tools. It is foreseeable that as AI tools like "Lingguang" become more popular, this "hand-crafted economy" will gradually move from the margins to the mainstream.
