IME a huge part of the cost of development (regardless of code/no-code tool choice) is the time spent gathering requirements and continuously validating them.

IME a huge part of the cost of development (regardless of code/no-code tool choice) is the time spent gathering requirements and continuously validating them. When the user and developer are the same people, the cost of finding the requirements can sometimes be nearly zero. In this case, that person will themselves choose the best tool for them. And the development cost will be very cheap -- for example, think of a short script you wrote to do something just for you. But when the user and developer are different people, much care should be taken to avoid cost explosion. To the outside this can look like "coding is expensive!" which is kinda true, but really it's the requirements discovery that dominates the cost. People don't understand each other perfectly, can sometimes talk past each other, etc. Iterative development's purpose is to mitigate the problem of building for the wrong requirements. No-code tools can unblock "developers" who own the requirements but don't have programming skills. That might make those projects very cheap. Or it could do the opposite: if the non-programmers don't know think carefully about what they're building, then they might end up spending just as much time as programmers would have as they iterate towards a complete solution.