When Warhammer 40k fans talk about the 'price' of a unit, there's about even chances that they're discussing how much of their army points budget it uses up, and how much it will cost to buy the models. If you've ever wanted a tool can calculate both sums at the same time, check out '40k army', a fan-made web app that does precisely that.
It has a very simple interface: select your Warhammer 40k faction, click to add units to your list, and watch the cost in points and dollars steadily climb. Apparently, my Death Guard force has an MSRP of $1,000 - not counting daemons - and my Knight collection around $750. It's eye-opening to say the least.
www.40kArmy.com began as a solo project by designer Charles George Brown from Manchester, UK, though two collaborators have joined the project since he revealed it on Reddit in early March. They've been steadily improving the functionality and filling out the data since then, and price data available is now available for seven different currencies. "The main work has really been around product thinking, UI decisions, data structure, and constant iteration based on community feedback", Brown says.
The hardest part has been "making the retail [data] genuinely trustworthy", he adds, since "pricing varies by region, some units map awkwardly to kits, some boxes can build multiple in-game options, and some things simply don't have a clean one-to-one retail match". He says he's most proud of the "overall look and feel of it - I wanted it to feel distinctive rather than like a generic spreadsheet tool". He also loves "the response from the community, it's been great seeing people immediately understand the idea and start using it properly".
Brown has "used AI as a development assistant mostly for debugging, prototyping, and speeding up repetitive coding tasks". He says "I have built many websites before", and AI "speeds up the build time, letting me have more fun with the UI and UX".
Are you willing to find out what your army costs? My collections all seem to average out at just over $500 per 1,000 points - I'd love to know if that's universal, or if there are armies that are far better or far worse. Let me know in the Wargamer Discord community if you find an outlier!