AI assistants and search decision
TrueSearch
A technical user can reproduce a useful people-search workflow by wiring search APIs, extraction, and a simple UI (prior art like aleph helps), but matching the vendor's mobile polish, App Store billing, and any proprietary data sources is unlikely without ongoing costs.
View on the App Store↗$2.5/mo
$30/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 24 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 TrueSearch alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Enter a name/username/email/phone → query public web/single-sign search APIs → extract public profiles/links/mentions → present aggregated results in a clean view.
What it still won’t have
- Access to any proprietary data sources or commercial people-data partnerships the app may use
- Polished native mobile UX and App Store distribution/management
- Any internal ranking/tuning or dataset curation the vendor maintains
- Built-in subscription/billing UX and analytics the App Store provides
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 24 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-hosted web application (Node.js + Express backend, Postgres database, React frontend) that accepts name/username/email/phone searches, queries one configurable web-search API (e.g., Bing Web Search or SerpAPI) and fetches result pages, parses and extracts public profile links/usernames/mentions, stores cached results in Postgres, and displays aggregated profiles and a short open-web summary. Out of scope: face/photo reverse search, paid/proprietary data broker integrations, mobile native app packaging. Include error handling for API failures and rate limits, basic auth for a single admin user, automated tests for parsing and API integrations, and deployment scripts (Dockerfile + docker-compose).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score61
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 · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTrueSearch - AI People Search - App Store
- open sourcealephdata/aleph
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
