Writing and content decision
Naval 25
A competent developer can reproduce the core voting, search, and quiz features in about a week and maintain it cheaply; there are no durable moats visible on the site to prevent replacement.
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.
$50one-off25 h to build
$0/mo5 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
- Users view quotes, search, or take a 2-option quiz and cast up to 25 votes; votes are tallied and rankings updated hourly.
What it still won’t have
- existing public vote history and social proof
- any domain-specific SEO and referral traffic built by the current site
- brand recognition and trust of the hosted product
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Naval 25 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 small web app with Next.js (React) + TypeScript, Postgres (hosted via Supabase or Neon), and Vercel for hosting. Core features in scope: serve a paginated list of quotes with upvote buttons; enforce a 25-vote limit per visitor (use per-IP + per-browser cookie); implement a search endpoint (Postgres full-text) and a quiz endpoint that returns two random quotes and records the selected one; background worker (cron or serverless scheduled function) that aggregates raw vote rows into hourly counters and updates the rankings; simple admin import script to bulk-load quotes from JSON/CSV. Out of scope: social login, analytics dashboards, monetization. Require: input validation, rate-limiting, tests for API endpoints, error handling, and deployment scripts (CI).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- Evidence score78
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 · 1
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNaval 25: Internet has chosen Naval's 25 best quotes
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
