Health, home and travel decision
Whatsnew
A minimal discover/listings site is realistic for a single technical person to build and host over a weekend, but reproducing the product's curated content, audience, and editorial polish requires ongoing curation and operational effort that a rebuild won't buy.
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.
$20one-off16 h to build
$0/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 Whatsnew alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Users discover and read curated listings; admins add/update events/listings; site displays listings on a searchable, filterable page (optionally timeline/calendar and map).
What it still won’t have
- Brand, existing audience and SEO rank
- Curatorial effort and editorial relationships with venues
- Any proprietary content ingestion pipelines or embargoed listings
- Polish of an established product (analytics history, integrations, mobile apps)
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Whatsnew 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 small discover-and-listings site using Next.js (React) + Tailwind, Postgres (hosted on Supabase or Render), and an admin panel (NextAuth + simple CRUD pages). Core features in scope: 1) data model for listings/events (title, dates, location, images, tags, description), 2) admin UI to add/edit/delete listings, image upload to S3-compatible storage, 3) public listing pages with search and tag filters, 4) optional calendar/timeline view using FullCalendar or Markwhen for markdown import, 5) sitemap and basic SEO meta tags, and 6) CSV/Markdown import route for bulk ingestion. Out of scope: advanced editorial workflow, mobile apps, paid tiers, complex analytics, or multi-tenant support. Include server-side validation, error handling, unit tests for API routes, and a deployment Dockerfile and CI pipeline (GitHub Actions) that runs tests and deploys to Vercel or Render.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
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 · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productWhatsnew city (official product)
- open sourcemarkwhen repository
- open sourcefullcalendar repository
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
