Developer tools decision
NEURAL DRAFT
Self-hosting is realistic: the project publishes an MIT MCP server repo and the product is largely an API+integrations stack, so a capable technical user can stand up and run a useful replacement and only give up hosted billing, managed scaling, and vendor support.
Visit website↗Built by Vedran Balagovic 💙, who ships 5 products in this index
$25/mo
$300/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$20one-off6 h to build
$100/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
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 NEURAL DRAFT alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Generate a blog post via an LLM, store content in a CMS, publish to a public site, create scheduled social posts, accept bookings, and create a Stripe checkout session.
What it still won’t have
- Hosted credit billing, top-ups, and hard-stop credit enforcement
- Turnkey managed integrations and uptime SLAs for social connectors and Stripe Connect
- Built-in paid image/video generation pipelines tied to vendor credits (e.g., Gemini Nano Banana)
- Hosted dashboard, managed scaling, and vendor support/priority support
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 5 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 self-hostable Neural Draft backend using Node.js (NestJS or Express), a Postgres database, a Redis-backed background worker (BullMQ), and a simple React admin UI. In scope: API endpoints for content/blog/social/bookings/commerce; database schema and migrations; LLM integration adapter (OpenAI/Anthropic)—abstract as a pluggable provider; social API adapter for scheduling (Twitter/X, LinkedIn) with queueing; Stripe integration with checkout session and optional Connect flow; MCP-compatible command-line server component to provide MCP responses to Claude/Cursor; background job processing for generation, translation, image requests, and scheduled posts; basic auth and API-key based access; CI tests for API endpoints and worker jobs; environment-based configuration, Dockerfiles, and a deployment guide for a single VPS (DigitalOcean) plus managed Postgres. Out of scope: multi-tenant SaaS billing UI, hosted credit marketplace, proprietary image model hosting, enterprise white-label SLAs. Provide error handling, retries for transient failures, logs, health checks, and unit/integration tests covering core flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Self-host verdict base92
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 1/1 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score99
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 · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNeural Draft — The Backend for AI-Built Sites
- official pricingNeural Draft Pricing
- open sourcestrapi/strapi
- open sourcedirectus/directus
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
