Instagram-like photo and video feed: what to build it with and what it costs
People sign in, follow each other, post photos and short videos, and scroll a feed with likes and comments.
Sample PRD
- Accounts and profiles
- Follow and unfollow
- Photo and video upload
- A feed of posts from people you follow
- Likes and comments
- Notifications
What it needs
- Email and password sign-in: everyone has an account
- Google sign-in (nice to have): sign in with Google is expected for a consumer app
- Realtime subscriptions: new likes and comments appear without a refresh
- Transactional email: sign-up and password emails
- Product analytics (nice to have): see what people actually use
MVP: about 100 users, $0/mo
Someone with an idea or a solo founder. Built with an AI app builder: describe it and it builds and hosts it.
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Base44 Starter | $16 |
| Mailgun Free | $0 | |
| Analytics & errors | PostHog Free | $0 |
Growth: about 10,000 users, $104.99/mo
A funded team or one with traction. Built with an AI coding agent for each of about 3 developers.
- Error tracking: know when something breaks
- Daily backups: daily backups once real people depend on it
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Fly.io Machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256MB RAM | $82.19 |
| Database | Firebase Blaze (pay as you go) | $2.85 |
| Sign-in | Firebase Blaze (pay as you go) | $2.85 |
| SendGrid Essentials 50k | $19.95 | |
| Analytics & errors | PostHog Pay as you go | $0 |
First cost jump: PostHog for Startups credits for early-stage companies (amount and conditions to verify). expires with credit unused
Scale: about 100,000 users, $1,063.57/mo
An established product. Built with an AI coding agent with team billing and admin for about 10 developers.
- Error tracking: know when something breaks
- Daily backups: daily backups
- Point-in-time recovery: restore to any minute after a bad deploy
- Multi-factor authentication: two-factor sign-in for accounts worth stealing
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Fly.io Machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256MB RAM | $802.19 |
| Database | Supabase Pro | $206.50 |
| Sign-in | Supabase Pro | $206.50 |
| Amazon SES A la carte | $15 | |
| Analytics & errors | Sentry Team | $39.88 |
Assumed usage: Each person views about 400 MB of photos and video a month and stores about 2 MB of posts.
What drives the cost
- Media storage and CDN bandwidth: photos and video dominate the bill as people post more
- Database reads: every feed load reads many posts
- Video transcoding, if you add it, is priced separately and isn't in these numbers
Lock-in
Moving millions of media files and the feed data model is the hard part; keep media in plain object storage with your own URLs.
Use this in Claude (with Kong Reviews connected at https://kongreviews.com/mcp)

