What It Costs to Build the Same App Across 12 JS Frameworks

Web developer Nolan Lawson built a tiny program, a Pokemon search utility, in 12 different JS frameworks. Coding agents running on the Claude Opus 5.5 model wrote the code for him. The cost ranged from $2.67 for Hono+htmx, a pair of microframeworks for building sites, to $4.97 for Angular, a venerable macroframework. The final size of the JS file your browser has to load ranged from 0 kilobytes (Astro) to 142 kilobytes (Next.js).

Hono+htmx matched Angular's result but with about 70% of the code. So if you are managing a team of coding agents, it is worth factoring in the cost difference when choosing between a microframework and a macroframework to reach similar results.