The problem with your mental model is that you're thinking the product is "code" when the product is "a finished product" CC is a horrible product for building

The problem with your mental model is that you're thinking the product is "code" when the product is "a finished product" CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do. Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier. In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to. Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it. I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)