Health, home and travel decision
Buddy Crush
A basic social habit tracker (groups + leaderboard) is realistic for one competent developer to build and operate in about a week; the main durable advantage is network effects (communities), which a DIY replacement won't have but doesn't prevent building a functional alternative.
Visit website↗Built by Marc Lou, who ships 32 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off36 h to build
$0/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Daily habit completion by users → update group view and leaderboard → social feedback and streaks
What it still won’t have
- Mature mobile apps (iOS/Android) and app-store distribution
- Large existing user community and network-derived content
- Polished UX, analytics, and marketing polish of a hosted product
- Advanced gamification or integrations not implemented
What remains hard
- Network effects
Create or join accountability groups , see each other's progress, and compete for the leaderboard!
- Network effects
Invite your friends to grow together. Join existing groups to make new friends!
- Network effects
Visualize when others complete their habits—as if you were doing it together!
First-year cost
No published price
Buddy Crush does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted single-tenant web app using Next.js (React) + Node API, PostgreSQL (Host on DigitalOcean or Supabase), and Postmark or SendGrid for email. Core features in scope: email auth and user profiles; create/join accountability groups; define daily habits and record completions (CRUD, recurrence rules); compute per-group consistency scores and a leaderboard; responsive web UI with group feed, habit checkboxes, profile and leaderboard pages; background job to compute daily leaderboard and send reminder emails. Out of scope: native mobile apps, third-party social logins, advanced gamification, and analytics dashboards. Require input validation, authentication checks, error handling for all API routes, background job retry logic, and automated tests (unit for score logic, integration for API endpoints). Provide README with deployment steps (Docker), a sample .env, and backup/restore instructions for the database.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score79
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
