Automation and integrations decision
Idle Pilot
A single competent developer can build and run a one-account replacement in about a week; no durable moats are evident and the product relies on standard platform APIs and modest hosting.
Visit website↗$9/mo
$108/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off34 h to build
$20/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
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
- Accept OAuth from Slack or Microsoft Teams, store a per-day schedule, background worker updates the platform presence per schedule, provide UI to view/change schedule and activity history.
What it still won’t have
- Polished commercial UX and copywriting
- Hosted SLA, uptime guarantees, and customer support
- Security review or third-party audits
- Scale-tested infra and analytics
- Potential edge cases handled by vendor (platform API changes handled automatically)
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
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 minimal Idle Pilot replacement using Node.js (Express) + Postgres + BullMQ (Redis) for background jobs, and a React admin UI. Core features in scope: OAuth connection for Slack and Microsoft Teams (store tokens securely), per-day work-hours scheduling with optional lunch break and timezone handling, background worker that sets platform presence on schedule and logs activity history, instant-off control, Stripe billing for a single flat monthly plan with webhooks, and a simple account/settings UI. Out of scope: Chrome extension, multi-tenant billing tiers, analytics dashboards, enterprise SSO, and security audits. Include error handling, retries/backoff for API calls, unit and integration tests for scheduler and webhook flows, and deployment scripts for Docker + managed Postgres and Redis (DigitalOcean/AWS).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score88
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 productIdle Pilot — official product page
- official pricingIdle Pilot — pricing
- official docsIdle Pilot — features
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
