alt Hacker NewsFighting complex technical and non-technical issues "with code" may be the most programmer way of thinking about things.
To begin with, that 200 dollars need to come from somewhere. Are you going to personally contribute to that 200 dollars? If not, someone needs to find money from somewhere. Then, I can assure you it's going to be much more than 200 dollars before you realize it.
Who spent the time to make this? If those people spent countless hours doing it by hand, maybe they would be willing to spend an analogous resource? It seems reasonable to me if you've already invested so much and paid in time.
But yeah that's why I was asking if this was a non-code issue? Because they're presenting it as hey, we couldn't figure out the battery life in this post.