Social media decision
Realtime
A small, single-developer replacement is realistic: the product is a lightweight dashboard that polls the Bluesky API, renders counts/screenshots, and exposes JSON — none of which require proprietary data or scale-only infrastructure.
Visit website↗Built by Lars, who ships 5 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-off20 h to build
$0/mo3 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 Realtime alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Poll Bluesky profile data, update UI, capture screenshot, allow JSON download, optionally refresh on an interval.
What it still won’t have
- Scale, uptime SLAs and CDN optimizations of a hosted service
- Curated featured-profiles and sponsorship/marketing reach
- A pre-built polished UI, branding, and convenience of a hosted dashboard
- Any non-public integrations or data the vendor may hold
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Realtime 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 single-developer replacement for realtime.blue as a JAMstack app: use Next.js (React) for frontend, a small Node.js/Express API for server-side screenshot and JSON proxying, Postgres or SQLite for optional caching, and Vercel or Netlify for hosting. Core features in scope: (1) fetch and normalize Bluesky profile JSON via server-side API proxy, (2) frontend dashboard showing follower/post/following counts and timeline, (3) auto-refresh polling with selectable intervals (10s/1m/5m), (4) confetti milestone animation and a "capture screenshot" endpoint that returns a PNG, (5) raw JSON viewer and download. Out of scope: multi-account teams, billing/subscriptions, analytics history beyond simple cached points. Include error handling for API failures, rate-limiting, and tests for API endpoints and key UI interactions.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score90
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 productRealtime Bluesky Metrics — realtime.blue
- official productRealtime Bluesky Metrics — realtime.blue
- official productRealtime Bluesky Metrics — realtime.blue
- official productRealtime Bluesky Metrics — realtime.blue
- open sourceqeeqbox/social-analyzer
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
