Social media decision
Touched-grass
Build — the functionality is small and reproducible (fetch post, render badge, store/display), so a single capable developer can replace the paid site and maintain it.
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.
$100one-off34 h to build
$25/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 Touched-grass alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- User submits an X profile or post → service fetches the post/profile → render a badge image and metadata → store and display badge and leaderboard → export/share as image or Markdown
What it still won’t have
- Hosted ad/monetization placements and sales UI
- Any proprietary backlink / do-follow sponsorship marketplace
- Built-in analytics and community features (unless implemented)
- Brand, SEO history, and existing user directory
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Touched-grass 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 minimal Touched-Grass clone using Node.js (Express), Postgres, and Puppeteer/Playwright for fetching X profiles/posts; use Sharp or SVG templates for badge image rendering. Core features in scope: (1) submit an X username or post URL and fetch/normalize metadata; (2) generate SVG/PNG badge images from templates including username, badge text, date and small icon; (3) store users and badges in Postgres; (4) public profile pages showing earned badges and a global leaderboard; (5) image download and copy-as-Markdown export endpoints. Out of scope: ad / sponsorship sales dashboard, payment processing, advanced analytics, large-scale rate-limiting and multi-tenant admin UI. Provide error handling for network/X failures, input validation, sensible retries, automated tests for fetch + render + persistence, and a Dockerfile plus a one-command deploy script for a small VPS.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
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 productTouched Grass: Free X (Twitter) Badge Generator
- official productConfettiSaaS.com profile page
- open sourcebadgen/badgen.net
- open sourceqeeqbox/social-analyzer
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
