Building a software product used to cost around $215,000. Today, with AI tools, that number has dropped to under $450. That gap is exactly why one expert believes DAOs are about to take off.
Kydo, a researcher at Eigen Labs, shared a detailed breakdown on X explaining why DAOs are no longer just a governance experiment. His argument is straightforward: AI has made building software so cheap that the cost of setting up a company now matters more than the cost of building the product itself.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
In a traditional setup, hiring one software engineer for 12 months costs roughly $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: under $450.
“That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a structural inversion,” Kydo wrote.
When building was expensive, nobody cared that an LLC cost $15,000. It was a rounding error. Now that AI has pushed production costs near zero, that $15,000 is the biggest expense on the table. DAOs, at a fraction of that cost, suddenly have a real advantage.
The Old Pitch vs the New Pitch
DAOs were always sold on ideology: decentralization, community ownership, censorship resistance. Kydo argues those ideas alone were never enough to justify the friction of working without a traditional company.
The new case for DAOs is purely economic. And economic arguments, as he put it, “scale.”
He backed this up with real examples. Nouns DAO hit a treasury worth over $50 million without any corporate entity behind it. Botto, an AI-generated art collective, used a DAO to let community members direct an autonomous artist and share in the earnings.
What This Means for Solo Crypto Builders
Kydo highlighted a problem many builders already know too well. Building is now cheap. Getting distribution and funding 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 make tokens “actually own and mean something, not this speculative fluffy thing that we have currently.”
Not Everyone Agrees
Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro responded, arguing that regulation, not costs, is the real reason DAOs haven’t taken off as fundraising vehicles.
Kydo pushed back: “crypto never had much reg clarity but it didn’t stop tokens and companies making 100s of billions here.”
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FAQs
A DAO is a blockchain-based organization run by smart contracts where members vote on decisions using tokens instead of relying on a traditional company structure.
AI has slashed software-building costs, making company setup the biggest expense. DAOs are cheaper than forming an LLC, creating a major economic advantage.
A DAO can be launched for $50–$250, while forming an LLC and hiring staff can exceed $200,000, even before product development.
Solo builders can now launch real products cheaply and use DAOs to attract funding, contributors, and users—turning side projects into viable ecosystems.
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