Over the last couple of months, I have been on a tear. I shipped HivePredict, a prediction market platform. I built card games, battleship, uno, minesweeper. I built automation tools. I built frontends, backends, bots and everything in between. All on Hive. All as one person.

And every time I shipped something new, the same thought kept creeping in: why are DHF proposals asking for so much money?

The DHF Has a Spending Problem

Let me be blunt. Most DHF proposals are overfunded. Not by a little. By a lot.

I watch proposals roll through asking for 300, 400, 500 HBD a day. They have teams of five, six, seven people. Project managers. Multiple frontend devs. Backend devs. DevOps. Community managers. The whole corporate starter pack.

And then you look at what they actually ship and you think... I just built something comparable to this in a weekend.

I am not saying that to flex. I am saying it because the math does not add up. If one developer with AI tools can ship a working Hive application in a few days, what exactly is a team of seven doing with 15,000 HBD a month?

Teams Scaled Because of Funding, Not Necessity

Here is what I think actually happened with a lot of these projects. They got funded first, then they figured out how to spend the money. The team did not grow because the problem demanded it. The team grew because the budget allowed it.

That is backwards.

When you are building with your own time and your own money, you make ruthless decisions about what matters. You cut scope. You automate. You find the fastest path to a working product. You do not hire a project manager to schedule standups about a blockchain app that two devs could knock out in a couple of days with AI.

But when the DHF is footing the bill? Suddenly every project needs a full org chart.

Nobody Seems to Be Shipping Faster

Developer efficiency is at an all time high. A single dev with AI tools can genuinely do the work of four or five developers depending on experience and skill level. At worse it's at least th work of two developers.

Even non-developers can ship trivial applications using AI without knowing how to code. The output might not be pretty and it might not be robust, but it will play the part for most use cases.

So here is the question that nobody in the DHF conversation seems to want to answer: if the tools have gotten this much better, why are funded teams not shipping any faster?

Look at the output of most DHF-funded projects over the last year. Compare it to what they were shipping in 2022 or 2023. Has the pace meaningfully increased? Has the volume of features gone up? In most cases, no. The same teams with the same budgets are producing roughly the same amount of work they always have, despite having access to tools that should have multiplied their output several times over.

That should concern every stakeholder who votes on proposals.

If these teams were genuinely using modern tools to their full potential, you would expect one of two things to happen. Either they ship dramatically more with the same team, or they ship the same amount with a much smaller team and a much smaller budget. Neither of those things is happening. The budgets stay the same. The team sizes stay the same. The output stays the same.

The only explanation is that these teams are either not adopting the tools that every other developer on the planet is adopting, or they have adopted them and are pocketing the efficiency gains as profit while the DHF keeps paying 2019 rates for 2026 work.

I have been building with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and everything else I can get my hands on. I regularly kick off complex tasks overnight and wake up to working code that would have taken a small team days to produce. This is not theoretical. This is my actual workflow. And it fundamentally changes how many people you need to build anything, let alone a Hive app.

So when I see proposals in 2026 still budgeted like we are in the pre-AI era, with bloated team structures and line items that assume everything has to be hand-cranked by a room full of developers, it tells me those teams are not paying attention. Or worse, they are paying attention and choosing to ignore it because the comfortable status quo pays better than honesty.

The Blockchain Does the Heavy Lifting

One thing that makes building on Hive uniquely cheap is that the blockchain itself handles most of what you would normally pay through the nose for. Data storage? On chain. Authentication? On chain. Consensus? On chain. You do not need to spin up expensive database clusters or build auth systems from scratch or worry about payment processing infrastructure.

Your hosting costs for a Hive frontend are genuinely trivial. We are talking a small VPS or even a static site on something like Vercel or Netlify. Maybe a lightweight API server if you need custom indexing. That is it.

So when a proposal includes massive infrastructure line items, I have questions. What exactly are you hosting that costs that much? Because I am running multiple Hive applications and my total monthly infrastructure cost would not cover a nice dinner out, it would probably barely cover lunch and coffee.

That's how cheap hosting and storage has become.

What a Realistic Hive Project Looks Like

If I were writing a DHF proposal today based on what I have actually learned building all of these apps, here is what it would look like:

One or two developers. That is your team. Maybe a part-time designer if the frontend needs to look polished, but honestly, AI can handle most of that too.

A budget that reflects actual costs: a VPS, a domain, maybe some API services. We are talking tens of dollars a month (maybe a couple of hundred), not thousands.

A timeline measured in weeks, not quarters. If your Hive app takes six months to build with a full team, something has gone very wrong.

Total ask? Maybe 30 to 50 HBD a day. And even that feels generous for most projects.

Stop Voting for Bloat

This is a community governance issue as much as it is a builder issue. Stakeholders who vote on DHF proposals need to start asking harder questions.

Why does this project need five developers? What has this team shipped in the last 90 days relative to their funding? Could this be done by a smaller team with better tools? Is this budget based on actual costs or on what the team thinks they can get approved?

I am not saying nobody deserves DHF funding. There are legitimate large-scale infrastructure projects that need real resources. The core blockchain development, major indexing infrastructure, that stuff matters and costs real money.

But the average Hive application? A dApp frontend? A community tool? A game? You do not need a funded startup to build those. You need one or two motivated developers and a cheap server.

A list of things I've shipped lately

Amongst all that, I was also routinely shipping updates to these apps. I don't just ship and move on, I take on community feedback, I fix bugs, I actively work to make these better.

I Built the Proof

I did not write this post from theory. I wrote it from experience. In the span of a couple of months, I shipped more Hive applications than some funded teams ship in a year or have shipped at all. I did it alone. I did it cheaply. And the apps work.

If that does not make you question where DHF money is going, I do not know what will. I have a full-time job believe it or not, I don't have copious amounts of spare time to build, which is why I love AI-assisted development so much. Some of these teams are allegedly funding people to be paid to work on these projects, in some cases full-time. Something doesn't add up here.

The era of needing large teams and large budgets to build on Hive is over. The tools exist. The blockchain does the heavy lifting. The only thing missing is the willingness to admit that most of these proposals could be done for a fraction of what they are asking.

It is time to stop funding headcount and start funding output. I'm not against the DHF, I think it's amazing. But I want to see people actually shipping getting funds for the work they do, not the work they say they'll do.

You Don't Need 500 HBD a Day to Build on Hive