Productivity · Weekend build
Build your own Notion
You need a team wiki, not a new operating system. Notion charges $12–$24 per person per month — that’s $144–$288 a year per person — 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 a team of up to 20 people maintaining internal documentation. The goal: make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. 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 Slite, Coda and Craft — 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 Notion you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 10 hours | markdown pages, nesting, search |
| 1 week | revisions, mentions, stale-page tracking, OAuth login |
| 3 months+ | databases, live collaboration, granular permissions — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Notion alternative needs
- nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content
- slash-free markdown editor with preview
- workspace search across titles and body text
- page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator
- mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history
Data model
Workspace, User, Page, PageRevision
Integrations
company OAuth provider
Capability context
Astro, HTMX, D1
The guardrail
Require authentication for every page and keep an immutable revision trail.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
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 “Teambook”, a deliberately focused alternative to Notion. 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: a team of up to 20 people maintaining internal documentation. Primary outcome: make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Notion. 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. An authenticated teammate creates a page beneath a parent, writes markdown, previews it, assigns an owner and review date, then publishes it. 2. A colleague searches for a phrase, opens the matching passage, follows an internal page link, and reports a stale page to its owner. 3. An editor compares the latest revision with an earlier one and restores it as a new revision without erasing intervening history. 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. Workspace shell: nested page tree, breadcrumbs, recent pages, favorites, search, create-page action, and signed-in member menu. 2. Page view: title, owner, last reviewed and edited metadata, rendered markdown, backlinks, stale indicator, and edit action. 3. Editor: title, parent, markdown textarea, side-by-side preview, internal-link autocomplete, owner, review date, and unsaved-change warning. 4. Search and history: highlighted snippets with filters; revision list with author, time, diff, restore, and audit context. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content 2. slash-free markdown editor with preview 3. workspace search across titles and body text 4. page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator 5. mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. All read and write paths require workspace membership; page slugs are unique among siblings and moves cannot create tree cycles. 2. Every successful content change creates an immutable revision, while restore writes another revision rather than mutating history. 3. A page is stale when its review date has passed; marking reviewed records the reviewer and schedules the next date. 4. Deleting a page is a reversible archive and requires the owner to choose what happens to child pages and inbound links. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Workspace, User, Page, PageRevision. 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 company OAuth provider. 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 Require authentication for every page and keep an immutable revision trail. 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. Searching a phrase in page body returns a permission-filtered result with a useful excerpt and opens at the relevant page. 2. Two editors saving from the same base revision cause the second save to show a conflict instead of overwriting newer content. 3. Restoring an old version changes the visible page, attributes the action, and leaves the complete revision chain available. 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 databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Teambook”, a deliberately focused alternative to Notion. 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: a team of up to 20 people maintaining internal documentation. Primary outcome: make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Notion. 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. An authenticated teammate creates a page beneath a parent, writes markdown, previews it, assigns an owner and review date, then publishes it. 2. A colleague searches for a phrase, opens the matching passage, follows an internal page link, and reports a stale page to its owner. 3. An editor compares the latest revision with an earlier one and restores it as a new revision without erasing intervening history. 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. Workspace shell: nested page tree, breadcrumbs, recent pages, favorites, search, create-page action, and signed-in member menu. 2. Page view: title, owner, last reviewed and edited metadata, rendered markdown, backlinks, stale indicator, and edit action. 3. Editor: title, parent, markdown textarea, side-by-side preview, internal-link autocomplete, owner, review date, and unsaved-change warning. 4. Search and history: highlighted snippets with filters; revision list with author, time, diff, restore, and audit context. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content 2. slash-free markdown editor with preview 3. workspace search across titles and body text 4. page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator 5. mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. All read and write paths require workspace membership; page slugs are unique among siblings and moves cannot create tree cycles. 2. Every successful content change creates an immutable revision, while restore writes another revision rather than mutating history. 3. A page is stale when its review date has passed; marking reviewed records the reviewer and schedules the next date. 4. Deleting a page is a reversible archive and requires the owner to choose what happens to child pages and inbound links. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Workspace, User, Page, PageRevision. 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 company OAuth provider. 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 Require authentication for every page and keep an immutable revision trail. 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. Searching a phrase in page body returns a permission-filtered result with a useful excerpt and opens at the relevant page. 2. Two editors saving from the same base revision cause the second save to show a conflict instead of overwriting newer content. 3. Restoring an old version changes the visible page, attributes the action, and leaves the complete revision chain available. 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 databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Teambook”, a deliberately focused alternative to Notion. 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: a team of up to 20 people maintaining internal documentation. Primary outcome: make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Notion. 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. An authenticated teammate creates a page beneath a parent, writes markdown, previews it, assigns an owner and review date, then publishes it. 2. A colleague searches for a phrase, opens the matching passage, follows an internal page link, and reports a stale page to its owner. 3. An editor compares the latest revision with an earlier one and restores it as a new revision without erasing intervening history. 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. Workspace shell: nested page tree, breadcrumbs, recent pages, favorites, search, create-page action, and signed-in member menu. 2. Page view: title, owner, last reviewed and edited metadata, rendered markdown, backlinks, stale indicator, and edit action. 3. Editor: title, parent, markdown textarea, side-by-side preview, internal-link autocomplete, owner, review date, and unsaved-change warning. 4. Search and history: highlighted snippets with filters; revision list with author, time, diff, restore, and audit context. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content 2. slash-free markdown editor with preview 3. workspace search across titles and body text 4. page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator 5. mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. All read and write paths require workspace membership; page slugs are unique among siblings and moves cannot create tree cycles. 2. Every successful content change creates an immutable revision, while restore writes another revision rather than mutating history. 3. A page is stale when its review date has passed; marking reviewed records the reviewer and schedules the next date. 4. Deleting a page is a reversible archive and requires the owner to choose what happens to child pages and inbound links. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Workspace, User, Page, PageRevision. 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 company OAuth provider. 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 Require authentication for every page and keep an immutable revision trail. 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. Searching a phrase in page body returns a permission-filtered result with a useful excerpt and opens at the relevant page. 2. Two editors saving from the same base revision cause the second save to show a conflict instead of overwriting newer content. 3. Restoring an old version changes the visible page, attributes the action, and leaves the complete revision chain available. 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 databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Teambook”, a deliberately focused alternative to Notion. 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: a team of up to 20 people maintaining internal documentation. Primary outcome: make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Notion. 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. An authenticated teammate creates a page beneath a parent, writes markdown, previews it, assigns an owner and review date, then publishes it. 2. A colleague searches for a phrase, opens the matching passage, follows an internal page link, and reports a stale page to its owner. 3. An editor compares the latest revision with an earlier one and restores it as a new revision without erasing intervening history. 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. Workspace shell: nested page tree, breadcrumbs, recent pages, favorites, search, create-page action, and signed-in member menu. 2. Page view: title, owner, last reviewed and edited metadata, rendered markdown, backlinks, stale indicator, and edit action. 3. Editor: title, parent, markdown textarea, side-by-side preview, internal-link autocomplete, owner, review date, and unsaved-change warning. 4. Search and history: highlighted snippets with filters; revision list with author, time, diff, restore, and audit context. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content 2. slash-free markdown editor with preview 3. workspace search across titles and body text 4. page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator 5. mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. All read and write paths require workspace membership; page slugs are unique among siblings and moves cannot create tree cycles. 2. Every successful content change creates an immutable revision, while restore writes another revision rather than mutating history. 3. A page is stale when its review date has passed; marking reviewed records the reviewer and schedules the next date. 4. Deleting a page is a reversible archive and requires the owner to choose what happens to child pages and inbound links. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Workspace, User, Page, PageRevision. 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 company OAuth provider. 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 Require authentication for every page and keep an immutable revision trail. 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. Searching a phrase in page body returns a permission-filtered result with a useful excerpt and opens at the relevant page. 2. Two editors saving from the same base revision cause the second save to show a conflict instead of overwriting newer content. 3. Restoring an old version changes the visible page, attributes the action, and leaves the complete revision chain available. 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 databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Notion? 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.
Two editors, one page, zero silent overwritesBase-revision checks, a three-pane diff, and nobody’s paragraph vanishes.
Build optimistic-concurrency editing for a wiki, so two people editing one page cannot silently destroy each other's work. Every save carries the revision id the editor started from. If the page's current revision still matches, the save commits and creates a new immutable revision. If someone saved first, reject with a conflict response. Never last-write-wins. Make the conflict response useful instead of hostile: return the current revision's content and show a three-pane view — their version, your version, and the base both diverged from — with a text diff highlighting exactly what changed on each side. Non-overlapping edits can offer a merge suggestion; overlapping ones make the human choose. The editor's unsaved text is sacred: it stays in the textarea, and in local storage, through the entire conflict dance. Resolving saves a new revision that records both parent revisions, so history shows the merge happened. Done when: two saves from the same base produce one commit and one conflict with a readable diff, no keystroke is ever lost to a conflict, and the revision chain records the resolution.
The backlink index that maintains itselfId-based links, updated in the save transaction, rename-proof by design.
Build a backlink index for a wiki: every page knows which pages link to it, kept accurate automatically. Internal links use stable page ids under the hood — the editor autocompletes titles into id-based references — so renames never break anything. On every save, parse the markdown for internal references, diff against the stored link set for that page, and update a links table (source id, target id) in the same transaction as the revision. No background rebuild jobs drifting out of date: the index changes only when a save changes it. Each page renders a backlinks section: the pages linking here, each with a snippet of surrounding text for context. Handle the awkward states: a link to an archived page renders with a subtle archived marker instead of breaking, and restoring the page revives the link untouched. A reference inside a code block is not a link — the parser respects markdown structure. Done when: renaming a page updates zero link rows yet every link still resolves, backlinks appear and disappear in lockstep with the referencing save, and archived targets degrade gracefully.
Move a page without creating a wormholeCycle checks before re-parenting, and slugs unique among siblings only.
Build page-tree operations for a nested wiki: moves that cannot create cycles, and slugs that stay unique where it counts. Pages form a tree by parent id. Moving a page re-parents it — and the classic bug is moving a page underneath its own descendant, which quietly severs the subtree from the root into an orbiting cycle. Before committing any move, walk from the proposed new parent up to the root; encountering the moving page rejects the move. Run the check and the re-parent in one transaction, because two concurrent moves can each look safe alone and form a cycle together. Slugs are unique among siblings, not globally: a setup page can exist under both Projects and Marketing. A move that lands a page beside a same-slug sibling prompts for a rename or auto-suffixes. Breadcrumbs and any materialized paths update on move. Done when: no sequence of moves — including concurrent ones — can orphan a subtree or create a cycle, sibling slug collisions are impossible, and a page's URL resolves correctly immediately after moving.
Restore is just another revisionHistory is append-only; restore copies forward instead of rewinding.
Build revision history for wiki pages: immutable, diffable, and restorable without rewriting the past. Every successful save appends a revision — author, timestamp, full content. Never mutate or delete one. The history view lists revisions with authors and times, and lets you compare any two: compute a line-level diff, with word-level highlighting inside changed lines if you are feeling thorough, rendered as additions and deletions. Restore is the part people get wrong: restoring revision 12 of 40 does not truncate history back to 12. It copies revision 12's content into a brand-new revision 41, attributed to the restorer, with a note pointing at what was restored. The intervening 28 revisions remain browsable forever. This makes restore itself undoable — just restore the pre-restore revision through the same mechanism. Storage note: full content per revision is fine at wiki scale. Resist delta-compression cleverness until it actually hurts. Done when: any two revisions diff cleanly, a restore appears as a new attributed revision with the full chain intact, and undoing a restore works through the exact same mechanism.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Notion?
A basic version — markdown pages, nesting, search — takes about 10 hours. Roughly 1 week gets you a solid v1 with revisions, mentions, stale-page tracking, OAuth login. Matching everything Notion really does (databases, live collaboration, granular permissions) is closer to 3 months+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Notion cost if I keep subscribing?
Notion runs $12–$24 per person per month on public paid plans, which is $144–$288 per year for every person on your team. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Notion 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 Notion replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: nested pages with title, cover color, and markdown content; slash-free markdown editor with preview; workspace search across titles and body text; page owner, last reviewed date, and stale-page indicator; mentions, page links, and a lightweight change history. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build databases, formulas, canvases, public sites, or real-time collaborative editing.
Does this build also replace Slite, Coda and Craft?
Yes. Notion, Slite, Coda and Craft all solve the same core job — make company knowledge easy to write, organize, search, and keep current. 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.