Games and entertainment decision
Twelve Games
A single developer can implement the core daily email + catalog + submission workflow, but they cannot recreate the product's existing audience, sponsor relationships, or brand value—those are the main paid assets.
Visit website↗Built by Matt, who ships 8 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-off120 h to build
$50/mo4 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
- Curate and publish a daily list of 12 games, send a daily subscriber email, let makers submit games, and host a browsable catalog with play/purchase links.
What it still won’t have
- Established audience and newsletter list (organic reach to '1,000s of players')
- Brand recognition and trust tied to the existing site
- Single-sponsor placement / commercial relationships
- Curation quality that comes from operator taste and history
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Seen by 1,000s of players →
First-year cost
No published price
Twelve Games 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 self-hosted Twelve Games replacement: use Next.js for frontend, Node.js + Express for APIs, Postgres (Supabase) for storage, and SendGrid for emails. Implement: admin CMS to create/schedule a 12-item daily drop; public pages for today's drop and a paginated/browsable catalog with tags and play/purchase links; a maker submission form that stores submissions in Postgres and exposes an admin moderation queue; scheduled job to send the daily email to subscribers; basic metrics (open/click) via the email provider; authentication for admin users. Out of scope: onboarding sponsorship sales UI and advanced recommendation algorithms. Include error handling, input validation, tests for API endpoints, and deployment scripts for Vercel (frontend) and a managed Postgres instance.
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 productTwelve Games — 12 new games every day
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
