Developer Builds AI Jury Duty Assistant Solo at SF Hackathon Using DigitalOcean

A developer participating in the MLH x DigitalOcean Hackathon built Justicia Clew, a mobile-first web app that answers jury duty questions using plain language drawn from a county court's own public website. The app was built solo over two days using a FastAPI backend and DigitalOcean's Gradient AI agents, with Santa Barbara County as the live demo. During deployment, the developer encountered a key lesson about cloud infrastructure costs: DigitalOcean's App Platform bills by the hour, not by the month, meaning a short hackathon deployment costs only pennies despite a listed monthly rate of $24. A secondary challenge arose from managing two separate billable resources — the app itself and an OpenSearch database — both of which must be manually shut down before hackathon credits expire on July 13. The experience highlighted that shipping with real infrastructure, unlike a mockup, carries ongoing costs and responsibilities that tutorials rarely address.
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