Social media decision
Fill
A competent developer or small team can rebuild the core anonymous Q&A and feed in a few weeks using existing open-source social platforms as references; the main losses are the live user base, moderation history, and app-store traction.
View on the App Store↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off102 h to build
$50/mo6 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 Fill alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Users post questions (optionally anonymous) → recipients answer privately or publicly → answers appear in feed; users follow profiles and interact via comments/likes.
What it still won’t have
- Existing app-store user base and distribution
- Mobile UX polish and platform-specific optimizations
- Built-in moderation history and community trust
- Integrated App Store subscription history for users (if you self-host)
- Analytics and crash-collection tied to the existing app
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Fill 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 minimal anonymous Q&A mobile backend and web admin using Node.js (Express), PostgreSQL, and React Native for the client. Core features in scope: email/Apple sign-in; user profiles with up to 3 photos and best-friends list; create/share anonymous question links; accept questions (private vs public answers); a chronological feed of posts grouped by subject with comments; media upload handling (images, short audio) saved to S3-compatible storage and served via CDN; basic moderation endpoints (report, block, ban) with a small admin UI; App Store subscription receipt verification endpoint. Out of scope: federated/distributed networking, complex ranking algorithms, large-scale analytics. Include input validation, authentication+authorization, rate limits, error handling, unit and integration tests, and deployment scripts (Docker + one-click deploy to a VPS or managed container service).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFill - Questions Anonymes App - App Store
- official productFill - Questions Anonymes App - App Store
- official productFill - Questions Anonymes App - App Store
- open sourcemisskey-dev/misskey
- open sourceslymnoyann/hey-1
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
