Design and diagrams decision
Unsection
A small, useful gallery (browse, filter, view) is realistic for one developer to build and maintain, but reproducing Unsection's curated scale, weekly content, and advanced search/animation features would be costly.
Visit website↗$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off62 h to build
$15/mo3 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 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 Unsection alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Browse and filter a catalogue of website section thumbnails, open a section to view details and assets, and (for paid users) unlock/down‑load or save sections to a collection.
What it still won’t have
- The curated scale and breadth (4,000+ sections) and the ongoing content curation
- Any proprietary search/ranking optimizations and future advanced features (screenshot text search, animation library)
- Community traction, updates added weekly, and founder-provided curation
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 5 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 minimal self-hosted 'section inspiration' gallery: use React + Tailwind for a static SPA, store images/SVGs in S3 (or compatible) and metadata in Postgres (or SQLite for single-machine). Implement: listing page with tag/style filters, detail page showing full assets, client-side Lunr search or Typesense for text+tag search, serverless functions (Node/Express on Vercel or Netlify Functions) for Stripe subscription checks and simple email-link auth, and a CI job to import/upload new section assets and rebuild the search index. Out of scope: automated scraping/copyright ingestion, multi-user organizations, collaborative features, and advanced ML-based screenshot search. Include error handling for failed uploads, payment failures, and search rebuilds, and add unit/integration tests for search, auth, and payment flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
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 productUnsection — official product
- official pricingUnsection — Pricing
- official docsUnsection — Feature category
- open sourcemicrosoft/Ontology-Playground
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.