AI assistants and search decision

DEJAVU

A compact QA assistant matching the product's stated title can be built and self-hosted by a single capable developer in roughly a week using existing open-source RAG/assistant projects; no durable moats are visible from the supplied page.

Visit website
You pay

Not priced

No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.

You’d pay instead

$100one-off32 h to build

$50/mo3 h/mo upkeep

No published price to break even against.

Open-source builds that already do this

Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All DEJAVU alternatives, with the arithmetic →

What a replacement has to do

  • Accept a user's question via a simple web chat UI, send the prompt to a hosted LLM API (optionally with a small retrieval/knowledge-context step), receive the model response, and render it back to the user with basic session history.

What it still won’t have

  • Proprietary hosted scaling and hardened infra
  • Any closed-source fine-tuned models or bundled API keys
  • Polished product UX, analytics, and commercial support
  • Any undisclosed integrations or proprietary data the vendor may have

What remains hard

  • Product polish and ongoing maintenance
Read the build prompt

First-year cost

No published price

DEJAVU 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

Keep paying
—

Subscription price × seats × 12

Build it
—

AI build —APIs + hosting —

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

Not run yet
Build a minimal self-hosted AI Q&A assistant using Next.js (React) for the frontend, a Node.js + Express backend, Postgres for session/history, and Milvus or SQLite+FAISS for a small vector index. Core features in scope: web chat UI, backend endpoint to call an external LLM API (configurable key), prompt templating with top-k vector retrieval, persistent session storage, and basic auth. Out of scope: built-in model training, multi-tenant billing, high-availability clustering. Include error handling, input validation, and unit tests for backend endpoints.
How we checked3 sources · 2/3 runs agreed · evidence score 86

How the score was reached

  • Build verdict base78
  • An open-source build was found+5
  • 3 cited sources+3
  • Evidence score86

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 →

Cited sources · 3

Every page the run actually retrieved.

Integrity checks

What held up, and what did not.

! 2 of 3 runs agreed; the verdict is the majority✓ Citations limited to fetched pages! 1 moat recorded