Health, home and travel decision
Shellevate
A technical user can realistically build a minimal replacement (timer, streaks, eggs, simple breeding and friends) in about a week, but reproducing the polished mobile UX, minigame, artwork, and social scale of the paid product is non-trivial—keep paying for the full consumer experience if those matter.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off36 h to build
$0/mo3 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
- Meditate daily to build a streak, earn currency, and collect/hatch turtles; optional friend accountability.
What it still won’t have
- Polished mobile-native UX and animations of a shipped iOS/Android app
- The Shallows minigame with interactive breeding UI
- Artwork and hundreds of unique turtle assets
- Scale and social network effects from many users
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Shellevate 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-tenant web app (Next.js + React, Supabase Postgres auth+storage, Vercel hosting) that implements: (1) user sign-up/sign-in, (2) a meditation session page with a timer that records session duration and awards sand dollars, (3) streak tracking (require >=5 minutes/day to count), Streak Freeze purchase flow using stored currency, and a calendar view, (4) turtle egg drops probabilistically on sessions, eggs hatch after three consecutive days, and a basic breeding endpoint that combines parent attributes to create a child, (5) friends by username search and viewing friend streaks. Out of scope: mobile-native app, animated minigame Shallows, large asset library, complex matchmaking or real-time multiplayer. Include server-side validation, error handling, input sanitization, tests for core business logic (streak counting, egg hatch, breeding), and deployment scripts for Vercel and Supabase.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- Evidence score52
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 productShellevate | Free Meditation App Shellevate
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
