Personal · Side quest build
Build your own Readwise Reader
Save links now. Actually read them eventually. Readwise Reader charges $10–$12.99 per month — that’s $120–$156 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 heavy reader saving articles, videos, and PDFs. The goal: capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. 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 Instapaper, Pocket and Matter — 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 Readwise Reader you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 2 days | url capture, reader view, archive |
| 1 week | highlights, tags, full-text search, weekly digest |
| 1 month+ | mobile apps, ebook sync, text-to-speech — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Readwise Reader alternative needs
- URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet
- reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time
- inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search
- highlights with optional notes
- a weekly email containing five unread picks
Data model
Document, Tag, Highlight, Digest
Integrations
page metadata extraction, transactional email
Capability context
Astro, D1, Workers
The guardrail
Respect robots directives and store only content the user explicitly saves.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
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 “Laterish”, a deliberately focused alternative to Readwise Reader. 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 heavy reader saving articles, videos, and PDFs. Primary outcome: capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Readwise Reader. 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 reader saves a URL through the app or bookmarklet, sees capture progress, corrects extracted metadata, tags it, and leaves it in the inbox. 2. The reader opens a clean reading view, changes typography, highlights passages with notes, and archives the document when finished. 3. The weekly digest selects five unread items, sends durable links, and records the digest so the same set is not repeatedly recommended. 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. Inbox and library: unread, archived, favorites, tag filters, content type, search, sort, bulk actions, and compact or comfortable density. 2. Capture dialog: URL or manual note, extraction state, editable title and author, tags, duplicate warning, and save-anyway option. 3. Reader: source link, title metadata, progress, typography controls, selectable text highlighting, note editor, and archive or favorite actions. 4. Highlights and digest settings: grouped highlights with source links, email schedule, timezone, unread threshold, and send-preview control. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet 2. reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time 3. inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search 4. highlights with optional notes 5. a weekly email containing five unread picks DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Canonicalize source URLs for duplicate detection while preserving the exact submitted URL and allowing an intentional duplicate. 2. Keep extraction asynchronous and failure-tolerant: an item must remain usable as a bookmark when readable content cannot be retrieved. 3. Anchor highlights to selected text plus surrounding context so the app can explain and recover from content changes. 4. Full-text search includes title, author, saved body, highlight text, and user notes but never fetches arbitrary pages during a search. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Document, Tag, Highlight, 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, D1, Workers 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 page metadata extraction and 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 Respect robots directives and store only content the user explicitly saves. 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. Saving the same canonical article twice warns the reader and offers to open the existing document without creating a silent duplicate. 2. An extraction failure creates a titled fallback bookmark with a retry action rather than losing the submitted URL. 3. Creating a highlight, refreshing, and reopening the document restores the selection and attached note in the correct passage. 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 ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Laterish”, a deliberately focused alternative to Readwise Reader. 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 heavy reader saving articles, videos, and PDFs. Primary outcome: capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Readwise Reader. 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 reader saves a URL through the app or bookmarklet, sees capture progress, corrects extracted metadata, tags it, and leaves it in the inbox. 2. The reader opens a clean reading view, changes typography, highlights passages with notes, and archives the document when finished. 3. The weekly digest selects five unread items, sends durable links, and records the digest so the same set is not repeatedly recommended. 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. Inbox and library: unread, archived, favorites, tag filters, content type, search, sort, bulk actions, and compact or comfortable density. 2. Capture dialog: URL or manual note, extraction state, editable title and author, tags, duplicate warning, and save-anyway option. 3. Reader: source link, title metadata, progress, typography controls, selectable text highlighting, note editor, and archive or favorite actions. 4. Highlights and digest settings: grouped highlights with source links, email schedule, timezone, unread threshold, and send-preview control. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet 2. reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time 3. inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search 4. highlights with optional notes 5. a weekly email containing five unread picks DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Canonicalize source URLs for duplicate detection while preserving the exact submitted URL and allowing an intentional duplicate. 2. Keep extraction asynchronous and failure-tolerant: an item must remain usable as a bookmark when readable content cannot be retrieved. 3. Anchor highlights to selected text plus surrounding context so the app can explain and recover from content changes. 4. Full-text search includes title, author, saved body, highlight text, and user notes but never fetches arbitrary pages during a search. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Document, Tag, Highlight, 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, D1, Workers 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 page metadata extraction and 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 Respect robots directives and store only content the user explicitly saves. 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. Saving the same canonical article twice warns the reader and offers to open the existing document without creating a silent duplicate. 2. An extraction failure creates a titled fallback bookmark with a retry action rather than losing the submitted URL. 3. Creating a highlight, refreshing, and reopening the document restores the selection and attached note in the correct passage. 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 ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Laterish”, a deliberately focused alternative to Readwise Reader. 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 heavy reader saving articles, videos, and PDFs. Primary outcome: capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Readwise Reader. 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 reader saves a URL through the app or bookmarklet, sees capture progress, corrects extracted metadata, tags it, and leaves it in the inbox. 2. The reader opens a clean reading view, changes typography, highlights passages with notes, and archives the document when finished. 3. The weekly digest selects five unread items, sends durable links, and records the digest so the same set is not repeatedly recommended. 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. Inbox and library: unread, archived, favorites, tag filters, content type, search, sort, bulk actions, and compact or comfortable density. 2. Capture dialog: URL or manual note, extraction state, editable title and author, tags, duplicate warning, and save-anyway option. 3. Reader: source link, title metadata, progress, typography controls, selectable text highlighting, note editor, and archive or favorite actions. 4. Highlights and digest settings: grouped highlights with source links, email schedule, timezone, unread threshold, and send-preview control. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet 2. reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time 3. inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search 4. highlights with optional notes 5. a weekly email containing five unread picks DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Canonicalize source URLs for duplicate detection while preserving the exact submitted URL and allowing an intentional duplicate. 2. Keep extraction asynchronous and failure-tolerant: an item must remain usable as a bookmark when readable content cannot be retrieved. 3. Anchor highlights to selected text plus surrounding context so the app can explain and recover from content changes. 4. Full-text search includes title, author, saved body, highlight text, and user notes but never fetches arbitrary pages during a search. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Document, Tag, Highlight, 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, D1, Workers 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 page metadata extraction and 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 Respect robots directives and store only content the user explicitly saves. 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. Saving the same canonical article twice warns the reader and offers to open the existing document without creating a silent duplicate. 2. An extraction failure creates a titled fallback bookmark with a retry action rather than losing the submitted URL. 3. Creating a highlight, refreshing, and reopening the document restores the selection and attached note in the correct passage. 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 ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Laterish”, a deliberately focused alternative to Readwise Reader. 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 heavy reader saving articles, videos, and PDFs. Primary outcome: capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Readwise Reader. 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 reader saves a URL through the app or bookmarklet, sees capture progress, corrects extracted metadata, tags it, and leaves it in the inbox. 2. The reader opens a clean reading view, changes typography, highlights passages with notes, and archives the document when finished. 3. The weekly digest selects five unread items, sends durable links, and records the digest so the same set is not repeatedly recommended. 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. Inbox and library: unread, archived, favorites, tag filters, content type, search, sort, bulk actions, and compact or comfortable density. 2. Capture dialog: URL or manual note, extraction state, editable title and author, tags, duplicate warning, and save-anyway option. 3. Reader: source link, title metadata, progress, typography controls, selectable text highlighting, note editor, and archive or favorite actions. 4. Highlights and digest settings: grouped highlights with source links, email schedule, timezone, unread threshold, and send-preview control. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet 2. reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time 3. inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search 4. highlights with optional notes 5. a weekly email containing five unread picks DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Canonicalize source URLs for duplicate detection while preserving the exact submitted URL and allowing an intentional duplicate. 2. Keep extraction asynchronous and failure-tolerant: an item must remain usable as a bookmark when readable content cannot be retrieved. 3. Anchor highlights to selected text plus surrounding context so the app can explain and recover from content changes. 4. Full-text search includes title, author, saved body, highlight text, and user notes but never fetches arbitrary pages during a search. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Document, Tag, Highlight, 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, D1, Workers 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 page metadata extraction and 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 Respect robots directives and store only content the user explicitly saves. 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. Saving the same canonical article twice warns the reader and offers to open the existing document without creating a silent duplicate. 2. An extraction failure creates a titled fallback bookmark with a retry action rather than losing the submitted URL. 3. Creating a highlight, refreshing, and reopening the document restores the selection and attached note in the correct passage. 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 ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Readwise Reader? 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 URLs, one article: the dedupe that asks firstStrip the tracking circus, keep the original, ask before merging.
Build URL canonicalization and duplicate detection for a read-later inbox. When a URL is saved, compute a canonical form for matching: lowercase scheme and host, strip fragments, strip known tracking parameters (utm_*, fbclid, gclid, ref), remove default ports and trailing slashes, and sort the remaining query parameters. Store both the canonical form and the exact submitted URL — match on canonical, fetch and display the original, because some sites genuinely need their weird parameters. On a canonical match with an existing document, do not save silently and do not block: warn, show the existing item with its saved date and read state, and offer open-existing or save-anyway. Save-anyway creates a deliberate duplicate, flagged as such. Keep a small per-domain exception list: some sites carry real content in query parameters (a video id, for instance), so parameter stripping needs an escape hatch for known offenders. Done when: the same article with different tracking-parameter confetti dedupes to one document, a deliberate duplicate is possible and labeled, and no exact submitted URL is ever lost or rewritten.
Highlights that survive the article changing underneathText plus context beats offsets, and orphans beat silent deletion.
Build text highlights that survive the underlying article being re-fetched, edited, or slightly mangled. Never store bare offsets — they die the moment content shifts. Store the selected text plus a prefix and suffix of surrounding context, say 30 characters each. To re-anchor on render: find exact matches of the selected text, disambiguate multiple occurrences using the context, and if nothing matches exactly, fuzzy-match with a similarity threshold and mark the highlight as relocated. When re-anchoring fails entirely, degrade honestly: show the highlight in an orphaned section with its saved text and note intact, and explain that the source passage changed. Never silently drop an annotation, and never paint the wrong passage — a misplaced highlight is worse than a missing one. Selections crossing element boundaries (spanning a link and a paragraph break) need care: anchor against the extracted plain text, then map back to DOM ranges for painting. Done when: highlights reattach correctly after re-extraction with minor edits, an ambiguous repeated phrase anchors to the right occurrence via context, and a vanished passage produces an orphaned highlight rather than a misplaced one.
Save the link now, parse it laterCapture in milliseconds, extract whenever, fail into a usable bookmark.
Build the capture pipeline for a save-for-later app: accept the URL instantly, do the heavy lifting afterward. Saving creates a document row immediately — state pending, title defaulted from the URL — and queues an extraction job. The job fetches the page (respecting robots directives), extracts readable content, title, author, and reading time, then updates the document to extracted. Capture itself returns in milliseconds and never waits on any of this. Failure is a first-class state, not an exception: timeouts, paywalls, 404s, and binary content each produce a failed-extraction document that still works as a plain bookmark — original URL preserved, title editable, with a visible reason and a retry button. Retries are idempotent: re-running extraction on an already-extracted document refreshes content cleanly without duplicating anything or resetting read state. Cap fetch size and duration, follow a bounded number of redirects, and record the post-redirect final URL separately from the submitted one. Done when: saving returns instantly regardless of the target site's mood, a dead link becomes a usable titled bookmark with a retry action, and retrying never loses user-entered metadata.
Five unread picks that don’t repeat themselvesFive forgotten saves, scored for variety, never resurfaced too soon.
Build the weekly digest picker: an email with five unread items you saved and forgot about. Selection is the interesting part. Candidates are unread, unarchived documents not featured in any recent digest. Score for variety rather than recency: mix old and new saves, mix content types, and avoid five articles from the same domain. Deterministic scoring with a random tiebreaker beats a pure shuffle — you want defensible picks, not chaos. Record every digest and its members, so next week's query excludes recently featured items until the unread pool runs dry. Only then allow repeats, oldest-featured first, rather than sending an empty email. Fewer than five unread items sends what exists; zero skips the send entirely with a note in the digest log. Send at the user's configured local time in their timezone, and make email links durable: they open the reader by document id and survive the article's original URL dying. Done when: consecutive digests never repeat an item while unread alternatives exist, an emptied inbox halts sends without error, and every email's contents are reconstructable from the digest log.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Readwise Reader?
A basic version — url capture, reader view, archive — takes about 2 days. Roughly 1 week gets you a solid v1 with highlights, tags, full-text search, weekly digest. Matching everything Readwise Reader really does (mobile apps, ebook sync, text-to-speech) is closer to 1 month+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Readwise Reader cost if I keep subscribing?
Readwise Reader runs $10–$12.99 per month on public paid plans, which is $120–$156 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Readwise Reader 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, D1, Workers. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal Readwise Reader replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: URL capture, manual notes, and a bookmarklet; reader view with saved source, title, author, and reading time; inbox, archive, favorite, tags, and full-text search; highlights with optional notes; a weekly email containing five unread picks. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build ebook sync, social discovery, text-to-speech, or public sharing.
Does this build also replace Instapaper, Pocket and Matter?
Yes. Readwise Reader, Instapaper, Pocket and Matter all solve the same core job — capture things quickly, read them in a calm interface, and resurface forgotten items. 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.