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AI has lowered software development costs, turning the economics in favor of DAOs for the first time.
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A researcher from Eigen Labs says DAOs now offer a real cost benefit.
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As building becomes cheaper, DAOs could become the fastest way for solo builders to launch and finance products.
Building a software product used to cost about $215,000. Today, thanks to AI tools, that number has dropped to less than $450. This gap is exactly why one expert thinks DAOs are about to take off.
Kydo, a researcher at Eigen Labs, shared a detailed overview of X, explaining why DAOs are no longer just a governance experiment. His argument is simple: AI has made building software so cheap that the cost of setting up a business now outweighs the cost of building the product itself.
The numbers behind the shift
In a traditional setup, hiring one software engineer for twelve months costs about $200,000. Add $15,000 for legal and LLC formation, and you’re looking at about $215,000 to get an MVP off the ground.
With AI tools like Claude Code and Opus, a single builder can now ship a working product for around $200. Setting up a DAO costs $50 to $250. Total: less than $450.
“That is not a marginal improvement. That is a structural reversal,” Kydo wrote.
When construction was expensive, no one cared that an LLC cost $15,000. It was a rounding error. Now that AI has made production costs close to zero, that $15,000 is the largest expense. DAOs, at a fraction of that cost, suddenly have a real advantage.
The old field versus the new field
DAOs have always been sold on ideology: decentralization, community ownership, resistance to censorship. Kydo argues that these ideas alone were never enough to justify the friction of operating without a traditional company.
The new case for DAOs is purely economic. And economic arguments, as he put it, “scale.”
He supported this with real examples. Nouns DAO touched a treasury worth over $50 million without a corporate entity behind it. Botto, an AI-generated art collective, used a DAO to let community members manage an autonomous artist and share in the revenue.
What This Means for Solo Crypto Builders
Kydo highlighted a problem that many builders know all too well. Construction is now cheap. Obtaining distribution and financing is not.
A working app built for $200 without a community behind it is just a side project. Add a DAO with a token and aligned contributors, and it becomes what Kydo calls “an economic organism.”
He also confirmed that Eigen Labs is working on solutions to create tokens “actually owning and meaning something, not this speculative fluffy thing we currently have.”
Not everyone agrees
Crypto attorney Gabriel Shapiro responded, arguing that regulation, not costs, is the real reason DAOs haven’t taken off as fundraising vehicles.
Kydo pushed back: “crypto has never had much regulatory clarity, but it hasn’t stopped tokens and companies from making hundreds of billions here.”