Marketing · Side quest build
Build your own Circle
A clubhouse for your people, without the monthly rent. Circle charges $99–$219 per month — that’s $1188–$2628 a year — for something you can replace with focused software of your own. Here is the honest scope, the honest timeline, and the exact prompt to hand your coding agent.
Who this replacement is for
This build targets one creator hosting a single community of members. The goal: give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. If you need more than that, keep paying — the point of building it yourself is owning a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not re-implementing a venture-funded roadmap.
Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Skool and Mighty Networks — they all solve the same core job.
How long it actually takes
One number would be a lie, so here are three. Each tier is a real, usable product — pick the one that matches how much of Circle you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 4 days | spaces, threaded posts, members, digests |
| 2 weeks+ | search, notifications, rich editor, member directory |
| 3 months+ | courses, events, paid memberships, mobile apps — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Circle alternative needs
- spaces for topics with member and admin roles
- posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions
- member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity
- invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests
- weekly email digests and basic moderation tools
Data model
Space, Member, Post, Reply, Reaction, Digest
Integrations
transactional email
Capability context
Astro, HTMX, D1
The guardrail
Authorize every space read and write by membership status and role, sanitize all member content server-side, and record moderation actions in an append-only log.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
The complete build prompt
Copy this into your coding agent of choice. It is scoped for a useful v1 — journeys, screens, business rules, data model, security, tests, and acceptance scenarios included. Pick your stack:
You are building a production-ready software product named “Clubroom”, a deliberately focused alternative to Circle. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator hosting a single community of members. Primary outcome: give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Circle. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator names the community, creates three topic spaces, sets membership to approve-to-join, and publishes a pinned welcome post. 2. A visitor requests to join, gets approved, completes a profile, posts a question in a space, and sees the replies again in the weekly digest. 3. The creator reviews a flagged reply, hides it with a recorded reason, and later removes a spammer whose posts disappear from every space. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Community home: space list with unread indicators, recent activity feed, pinned welcome post, and the join state for visitors. 2. Space and thread: post list, composer, threaded replies with reactions, author roles, pin and lock controls, and pagination. 3. Members: profile with avatar, bio, and recent activity, the member directory, and pending join requests with approve and reject for admins. 4. Moderation and digest settings: flagged-content queue, hide and remove actions with reasons, digest frequency, and per-member unsubscribe state. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. spaces for topics with member and admin roles 2. posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions 3. member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity 4. invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests 5. weekly email digests and basic moderation tools DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Authorize every read and write by membership status and role; pending, rejected, and removed members see nothing beyond the public landing page. 2. Sanitize all post and profile content server-side, rate-limit posting and reactions, and allow one reaction per member per post. 3. Record every moderation action in an append-only log with actor, target, and reason, and hide rather than hard-delete content so decisions stay reviewable. 4. Send digests only to members who have not opted out, include only content each recipient may read, and honor unsubscribe links immediately. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Space, Member, Post, Reply, Reaction, Digest. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Astro pages and ordinary HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must remain understandable if either enhancement layer fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Authorize every space read and write by membership status and role, sanitize all member content server-side, and record moderation actions in an append-only log. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a removed member follows an old thread link, they see the public landing page and none of the space content. 2. Given two members react to the same reply at once, the count increases by exactly two and each member can remove only their own reaction. 3. Given a hidden post, other members no longer see it, the author sees a moderation notice, and the log records who hid it and why. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Clubroom”, a deliberately focused alternative to Circle. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator hosting a single community of members. Primary outcome: give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Circle. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator names the community, creates three topic spaces, sets membership to approve-to-join, and publishes a pinned welcome post. 2. A visitor requests to join, gets approved, completes a profile, posts a question in a space, and sees the replies again in the weekly digest. 3. The creator reviews a flagged reply, hides it with a recorded reason, and later removes a spammer whose posts disappear from every space. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Community home: space list with unread indicators, recent activity feed, pinned welcome post, and the join state for visitors. 2. Space and thread: post list, composer, threaded replies with reactions, author roles, pin and lock controls, and pagination. 3. Members: profile with avatar, bio, and recent activity, the member directory, and pending join requests with approve and reject for admins. 4. Moderation and digest settings: flagged-content queue, hide and remove actions with reasons, digest frequency, and per-member unsubscribe state. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. spaces for topics with member and admin roles 2. posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions 3. member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity 4. invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests 5. weekly email digests and basic moderation tools DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Authorize every read and write by membership status and role; pending, rejected, and removed members see nothing beyond the public landing page. 2. Sanitize all post and profile content server-side, rate-limit posting and reactions, and allow one reaction per member per post. 3. Record every moderation action in an append-only log with actor, target, and reason, and hide rather than hard-delete content so decisions stay reviewable. 4. Send digests only to members who have not opted out, include only content each recipient may read, and honor unsubscribe links immediately. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Space, Member, Post, Reply, Reaction, Digest. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Render with React Server Components by default. Use Server Actions for authenticated form mutations and add Client Components only for interactions that genuinely require browser state, browser APIs, drag-and-drop, or live updates. The core workflow must remain understandable before client-side JavaScript finishes loading. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Next.js, the App Router, and TypeScript. Use Server Components by default, Server Actions for authenticated mutations, and Route Handlers for public APIs, OAuth callbacks, webhooks, feeds, uploads, and downloads. Use PostgreSQL through Drizzle ORM with versioned migrations and an isolated test database. Access S3-compatible object storage through a server-only adapter, and run slow or retryable work in a real job or workflow system instead of the request lifecycle. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Authorize every space read and write by membership status and role, sanitize all member content server-side, and record moderation actions in an append-only log. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a removed member follows an old thread link, they see the public landing page and none of the space content. 2. Given two members react to the same reply at once, the count increases by exactly two and each member can remove only their own reaction. 3. Given a hidden post, other members no longer see it, the author sees a moderation notice, and the log records who hid it and why. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Clubroom”, a deliberately focused alternative to Circle. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator hosting a single community of members. Primary outcome: give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Circle. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator names the community, creates three topic spaces, sets membership to approve-to-join, and publishes a pinned welcome post. 2. A visitor requests to join, gets approved, completes a profile, posts a question in a space, and sees the replies again in the weekly digest. 3. The creator reviews a flagged reply, hides it with a recorded reason, and later removes a spammer whose posts disappear from every space. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Community home: space list with unread indicators, recent activity feed, pinned welcome post, and the join state for visitors. 2. Space and thread: post list, composer, threaded replies with reactions, author roles, pin and lock controls, and pagination. 3. Members: profile with avatar, bio, and recent activity, the member directory, and pending join requests with approve and reject for admins. 4. Moderation and digest settings: flagged-content queue, hide and remove actions with reasons, digest frequency, and per-member unsubscribe state. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. spaces for topics with member and admin roles 2. posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions 3. member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity 4. invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests 5. weekly email digests and basic moderation tools DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Authorize every read and write by membership status and role; pending, rejected, and removed members see nothing beyond the public landing page. 2. Sanitize all post and profile content server-side, rate-limit posting and reactions, and allow one reaction per member per post. 3. Record every moderation action in an append-only log with actor, target, and reason, and hide rather than hard-delete content so decisions stay reviewable. 4. Send digests only to members who have not opted out, include only content each recipient may read, and honor unsubscribe links immediately. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Space, Member, Post, Reply, Reaction, Digest. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Blade views and ordinary forms. Use Livewire for focused server-driven interactions and Alpine.js only for small local interface state. The core workflow must remain understandable without relying on a client-side application shell. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Laravel, PHP, Blade, Livewire, and Alpine.js. Use controllers and Blade forms for durable navigation, Livewire for focused interactions, Form Requests for validation, Policies and Gates for authorization, and small application actions or services for domain transitions. Use Eloquent with migrations, database constraints, and transactions; Laravel Storage for private S3-compatible files; queued Jobs for retryable work; the Scheduler for recurring work; and Notifications or Mail for email. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Authorize every space read and write by membership status and role, sanitize all member content server-side, and record moderation actions in an append-only log. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a removed member follows an old thread link, they see the public landing page and none of the space content. 2. Given two members react to the same reply at once, the count increases by exactly two and each member can remove only their own reaction. 3. Given a hidden post, other members no longer see it, the author sees a moderation notice, and the log records who hid it and why. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Clubroom”, a deliberately focused alternative to Circle. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator hosting a single community of members. Primary outcome: give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Circle. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator names the community, creates three topic spaces, sets membership to approve-to-join, and publishes a pinned welcome post. 2. A visitor requests to join, gets approved, completes a profile, posts a question in a space, and sees the replies again in the weekly digest. 3. The creator reviews a flagged reply, hides it with a recorded reason, and later removes a spammer whose posts disappear from every space. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Community home: space list with unread indicators, recent activity feed, pinned welcome post, and the join state for visitors. 2. Space and thread: post list, composer, threaded replies with reactions, author roles, pin and lock controls, and pagination. 3. Members: profile with avatar, bio, and recent activity, the member directory, and pending join requests with approve and reject for admins. 4. Moderation and digest settings: flagged-content queue, hide and remove actions with reasons, digest frequency, and per-member unsubscribe state. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. spaces for topics with member and admin roles 2. posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions 3. member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity 4. invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests 5. weekly email digests and basic moderation tools DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Authorize every read and write by membership status and role; pending, rejected, and removed members see nothing beyond the public landing page. 2. Sanitize all post and profile content server-side, rate-limit posting and reactions, and allow one reaction per member per post. 3. Record every moderation action in an append-only log with actor, target, and reason, and hide rather than hard-delete content so decisions stay reviewable. 4. Send digests only to members who have not opted out, include only content each recipient may read, and honor unsubscribe links immediately. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Space, Member, Post, Reply, Reaction, Digest. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Rails views and ordinary forms. Use Turbo for navigation, submissions, and server-driven updates, then Stimulus only for small browser-side behavior. Do not turn the product into a client-side SPA, and keep the core workflow usable when enhancement fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire: Turbo for navigation, form submissions, and server-driven updates, and Stimulus for small browser-side behavior. Use RESTful controllers with strong parameters and explicit authorization, with domain transitions in testable models or small application services. Use Active Record migrations plus database-level constraints and transactions; Active Storage with an S3-compatible service for private files; Active Job with a durable queue backend for retryable work; Action Mailer for email; and Action Cable only when live updates are required. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Authorize every space read and write by membership status and role, sanitize all member content server-side, and record moderation actions in an append-only log. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a removed member follows an old thread link, they see the public landing page and none of the space content. 2. Given two members react to the same reply at once, the count increases by exactly two and each member can remove only their own reaction. 3. Given a hidden post, other members no longer see it, the author sees a moderation notice, and the log records who hid it and why. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Circle? Fine. These are the peculiar sub-problems hiding inside it — the parts that are actually interesting to build. Each one is a standalone prompt, scoped to an evening, no strings attached to the full build.
The reaction count that survives a pile-onOne emoji per member per post, atomic under simultaneous taps.
Build emoji reactions for a community platform. The rule is one reaction per member per post, and the enforcement is structural: a unique constraint on (member, post) in the reactions table, so a double-tap, a retried request, or two devices racing can't create duplicates no matter what the application code does. Toggle semantics: reacting when you already have inserts nothing and removes your existing one, or switches the emoji, pick one and be consistent. Members can remove only their own reaction, checked server-side. Displayed counts must stay honest under concurrency: derive them from the table or maintain a counter updated in the same transaction as the insert or delete, never incremented separately where it can drift. When two members react simultaneously the count rises by exactly two. Render grouped counts per emoji with the current member's own reaction highlighted, and update optimistically in the UI with reconciliation on the server's answer. Done when: hammering the reaction button yields at most one row, simultaneous reactions from two members count exactly two, and displayed counts match the table after any race.
The moderation that hides but never shredsHidden posts, append-only logs, and decisions someone can actually review.
Build hide-don't-delete moderation for a community platform. Moderation removes content from view without destroying evidence. Hiding a post or reply marks it hidden with a required reason; regular members no longer see it, the author sees a placeholder saying a moderator hid it, and admins can still read the original when reviewing an appeal. Nothing is hard-deleted by a moderation action, threads keep their shape, with hidden replies collapsing to a marker rather than silently renumbering the conversation. Record every action, hide, unhide, member removal, in an append-only moderation log: actor, target, reason, timestamp. No update or delete path exists for log rows, so the history of who did what stays trustworthy even when a moderation decision itself is disputed. Removing a spammer hides all their content in one operation, logged as one action with the member as target, reversible if the ban was a mistake. Done when: a hidden post is invisible to members, placeholder-visible to its author, and readable by admins; the log records every action immutably; and unhiding restores content exactly.
The digest that knows what each member is allowed to readWeekly email, permission-filtered per recipient, unsubscribe honored instantly.
Build the weekly digest pipeline for a community platform. Once a week, each opted-in member gets an email summarizing what happened: top posts by engagement, active threads, new members. The correctness core is per-recipient permission filtering: content is selected against what that member may read at send time, so a private space's thread never leaks into the digest of someone outside it, and content hidden by moderation appears in nobody's. Build the digest per recipient, not one broadcast. Skip members with nothing to show rather than sending an empty shell. Honor unsubscribes immediately, the tokenized link in the footer works without login, flips the preference in one click, and a send job already running checks the flag per recipient before dispatch. Make the job idempotent with a per-member-per-period send record, so a crashed run resumed doesn't double-send, and record delivery state for the admin. Done when: two members in different spaces get different digests reflecting their access, an unsubscribe mid-run suppresses that member, and rerunning a crashed job never duplicates an email.
The unread dot that costs one row per member per spaceWatermarks, not per-post receipts. Cheap at any scale.
Build unread indicators for a community's topic spaces. Members should see at a glance which spaces have new activity. The naive design, a read-receipt row per member per post, explodes into millions of rows for a modest community. Use watermarks instead: one row per member per space holding the timestamp of their last visit. A space is unread when its latest post or reply is newer than the watermark; the space list needs each space's latest-activity timestamp, which you maintain as a denormalized column updated on every post or reply, compared against the member's watermarks in a single query. Advance the watermark when the member opens the space, and decide the semantics deliberately: opening marks all current content read, even below the scroll fold, which is the honest tradeoff of watermarks, name it and accept it. New members start with everything unread or everything read by joining date, pick one. A member's own posts never mark their space unread for themselves. Done when: unread dots appear and clear correctly across two accounts, storage stays at one row per member per space, and the space list renders its indicators in one query.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Circle?
A basic version — spaces, threaded posts, members, digests — takes about 4 days. Roughly 2 weeks+ gets you a solid v1 with search, notifications, rich editor, member directory. Matching everything Circle really does (courses, events, paid memberships, mobile apps) is closer to 3 months+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Circle cost if I keep subscribing?
Circle runs $99–$219 per month on public paid plans, which is $1188–$2628 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Circle alternative?
The build prompt on this page ships in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, HTMX, D1. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal Circle replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: spaces for topics with member and admin roles; posts with threaded replies and emoji reactions; member profiles with avatar, bio, and recent activity; invite links plus approve-to-join membership requests; weekly email digests and basic moderation tools. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build courses, events, paid memberships, livestreams, gamification, or mobile apps in v1.
Does this build also replace Skool and Mighty Networks?
Yes. Circle, Skool and Mighty Networks all solve the same core job — give members topic spaces, threaded conversations, and weekly digests on infrastructure the creator controls. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever you currently pay for.