Uncategorised decision
EuroAlternative
A small technical team or single developer can build and maintain a usable curated alternatives directory in about a week; EuroAlternative's value is audience/brand and curation rather than technical complexity, so self-hosting a replacement is realistic.
Visit website↗Built by Piotr Kulpinski, who ships 4 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-off34 h to build
$15/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
- User browses and searches a curated directory of European software, filters by category/country/collection, views provider detail pages, and subscribes for updates.
What it still won’t have
- Brand recognition and existing audience/traffic
- Curatorial editorial voice and existing curated collections
- Any commercial relationships, advertising placements, or affiliate integrations the site has
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
EuroAlternative 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 lightweight web directory in Node.js (Express) + Postgres + Next.js for frontend. Implement: (1) an admin CRUD UI to create Providers, Categories, Countries, Collections, Tags; (2) public listing pages with pagination and faceted filters (category, country, collection, tags); (3) provider detail pages with logo, description, and 'European Alternative to' field; (4) full-text search using Meilisearch (or Postgres full-text) integrated with filters; (5) newsletter subscription using a Mail provider API; (6) deploy to a single VPS or platform (e.g., DigitalOcean), automated CI deploy, HTTPS, and basic privacy-first analytics (Matomo or simple cookieless). Out of scope: payments, advertising marketplace, multi-tenant accounts, and personalized recommendations. Include error handling, input validation, tests for core APIs, and docs for deploy and backup procedures.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score85
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.
- official productEuroAlternative — official product
- official pricingEuroAlternative — pricing
- official docsEuroAlternative — features
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
