Valid points on both fronts — especially on the hidden cost of context reloading during refactors.

1. On AI costs: You're 100% right. $200 only covers reaching the initial green build. The moment you hit a schema migration or cross-file refactor, feeding the whole dependency graph back into the context window causes token burn to compound rapidly.
2. On upstream shifts & maintenance: This is a real issue with monolithic, tightly-coupled starters. I designed Codapult around an adapter-first architecture partly for this reason — as well as making provider swapping seamless. Third-party integrations (Auth, Payments, DB) are isolated behind strict TypeScript interfaces. If a provider introduces a breaking API change, you only refactor a single adapter implementation (e.g., ⁠stripe-adapter.ts⁠). Your core application logic and UI remain completely untouched, keeping the blast radius contained to a single module instead of cascading through the entire repo.