A tooltip pointing at a button, shown once per user, is well-bounded UI work — genuinely a weekend project for your own app. A visual no-code builder for any app's onboarding is a much deeper, different product, same as Appcues' case.
Borderline
Effort: a weekendRunning cost: $0/mo to start
Why CanICodeThis says Borderline
A hardcoded onboarding checklist and tooltips pointing at specific UI elements are straightforward front-end work
Tracking which users have seen which step is a simple flag per user
For your own app, hand-coding the flow is genuinely a weekend project
The parts that'll cause problems
A visual builder letting a non-engineer create flows for any website's DOM is a much bigger, more general engineering problem
Targeting rules based on user behavior or attributes need a real segmentation engine
A/B testing different onboarding flows compounds this register's basic A/B testing challenge
How I'd build this
frontend
Next.js
database
Supabase
hosting
Vercel
MVP scope
A hardcoded setup checklist
Tooltips pointing at specific UI elements, shown once per user
Simple per-user completion tracking
Postpone to v2
A visual no-code builder for arbitrary flows
Behavior-based targeting rules
A/B testing different flows
What it actually costs to build
AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)
$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription
$43–$86 one-time
Hosting, once it's running
$0/mo (free tier)
Domain name, if you want your own
~$12/yr
Existing tools solving a similar problem typically run $300–$300/mo — see how they compare below.
The build prompt
Build me an onboarding tour for my own app: a hardcoded checklist of setup steps, and tooltips pointing at specific UI elements, shown once per user and tracked with a simple flag. Skip the visual no-code builder — hand-coding for your own app is real, achievable work.