What you're building, and what it costs

You are going to build a spending tracker with a camera in it.

You open the app, type an amount, pick a category, and — if you want — photograph the receipt. Everything is stored on the phone. A history tab lists what you logged and lets you search it. An insights tab shows where the month went. In the evening the phone reminds you to log the day. No account, no server, no internet: it works on a plane and in a lift.

By the end of module 6 that app is installable by strangers from the Play Store, and you can push a fix to it in about a minute.

Why this app and not a to-do list

Every beginner course builds a to-do list. This one does not, and the reason is not taste.

Apple's App Store Review Guidelines have a section called Minimum Functionality, guideline 4.2: if your app is not particularly useful, unique or "app-like", it does not belong on the App Store. A tutorial to-do list is the most rejected shape of first app there is, and so is anything that reads as a repackaged website.

A spending tracker with a camera in it clears that line comfortably, in three ways at once:

• It uses real hardware — the camera, the file system, a local notification.
• It holds content the user made — their own entries, their own photographs.
• It has no login and no backend, so Apple's account-deletion requirement never applies to you and Google's Data safety form is one honest click saying "no data collected".

Each of those removes a wall you would otherwise hit in module 6 with a finished app and no way through. Expense trackers are a crowded category, and we come back to that honestly at the end: "another expense tracker" is a perfectly good first ship and a poor product, and knowing the difference is worth more than pretending otherwise.

Name it now. Pick a name you would not mind on your own home screen. The examples here use pocket-ledger; yours should be yours. You type it into a prompt in lesson 3, and every screenshot you take after that differs from everybody else's.

The money map

Modules 1 to 5 cost nothing. Not "nothing if you are careful" — the tools are free, the Expo account is free, running on your own phone is free, and pushing updates to an installed app is free. A Windows laptop and an Android phone reach a real, installable app without a payment page.

Then two charges, both optional, both in module 6:

• Twenty-five dollars, once, for a Google Play developer account. Never renewed. The first real wall in the course, and the cheapest one in the industry.
• Ninety-nine dollars a year for Apple, only if you want an iPhone build. An appendix, not a requirement. You can build an iOS app from Windows without owning a Mac, but any install on an actual iPhone needs the paid account.

The cost nobody puts in the syllabus

Now the awkward part, and it goes here rather than in module 3 where you would find it yourself.

Claude Code has no free tier. Anthropic's setup documentation says it requires a Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise or Console account, and that the free Claude.ai plan does not include Claude Code access.

Expo's excellent free tutorial does not mention this. Neither does any other course we could find. You are about to install a tool that will not sign in without a paid account, and you deserve to know now rather than at the end of lesson four.

In India there is a sharper version of the same objection, and it is real: a Claude subscription costs several times what its nearest competitor's entry tier does, and website subscriptions still need a credit or debit card, because UPI is not accepted.

We are deliberately not printing a rupee figure. Two credible sources disagree about which tier a widely quoted Indian price belongs to — one calls it Pro, the other a per-seat Team price — and a course that guesses on your behalf is worse than one that says "go and look".

The path that costs nothing until lesson 4

Lessons 1 to 3 need no paid Claude account. You type three commands yourself and the app arrives on your phone. If you want help along the way, free Claude.ai chat in a browser is enough.

From lesson 4, Claude Code has to run in your project folder, reading and writing your files, and that needs Console credits or a subscription. Credits are the cheaper entry: you top up a small amount and it draws down rather than renewing monthly.

So: get the app on your phone for free, decide whether the rest is worth it, then spend money. That is the right order.

Kung makikita mo The pricing page shows a different number from the one I expected

That is the point of looking. Anthropic localised pricing to several currencies during 2026 and the figures move. The page loaded from your own country is the only number worth acting on — not a figure in a course, a video, or an article from six months ago.

Kung makikita mo I only have an iPhone, not an Android phone

Modules 1 to 5 still work: Expo Go exists on iOS and the app will run. Two warnings. The iOS build of Expo Go can lag a release behind the current Expo SDK, so it is the less reliable path, and module 6 is written for the Play Store because that is the twenty-five dollar door rather than the ninety-nine dollar one. Borrow an Android phone for the shipping module if you can.