Personal · Weekend build
Build your own Wanderlog
The trip, planned by you instead of forty open tabs. Wanderlog charges $5.99–$9.99 per month — that’s $72–$120 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 traveler organizing a trip for a small group. The goal: plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. 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 TripIt — 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 Wanderlog you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 8 hours | trips, daily itinerary, map pins, share link |
| 3 days | route times, budgets, attachments, packing templates |
| 3 months+ | flight imports, mobile apps, recommendations, route optimization — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Wanderlog alternative needs
- trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary
- places with notes, addresses, and map pins
- drag to reorder days and the places within them
- a packing checklist per trip
- a read-only share link for travel companions
Data model
Trip, Day, Place, PackingItem, ShareLink
Integrations
OpenStreetMap tiles, geocoding API
Capability context
Astro, Alpine, D1
The guardrail
Make share links unguessable, revocable, and strictly read-only, and never expose the owner’s other trips through a shared page.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
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 “Tripsheet”, a deliberately focused alternative to Wanderlog. 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 traveler organizing a trip for a small group. Primary outcome: plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Wanderlog. 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 traveler creates a trip with dates, adds places to each day with notes and map pins, and drags day two’s dinner ahead of the museum visit. 2. The traveler builds a packing checklist, ticks items off during the week before departure, and adds a forgotten adapter from a phone. 3. The traveler shares a read-only link; a companion opens it without an account, sees the current itinerary and pins, and never encounters an edit control. 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. Trips list: upcoming and past trips with dates, cover color, place counts, and a create-trip action. 2. Itinerary: day columns with ordered places, notes, drag handles for reordering days and places, and an add-place form with pin lookup. 3. Map view: pins for every place colored by day, a selected-place card with notes, and a fit-to-trip zoom. 4. Packing and sharing: the checklist with checked state and quick add, plus share-link creation, copy, and revoke controls. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary 2. places with notes, addresses, and map pins 3. drag to reorder days and the places within them 4. a packing checklist per trip 5. a read-only share link for travel companions DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Keep day and place order as explicit integer positions updated atomically on drag, so reordering never duplicates or drops an item. 2. Geocode place lookups server-side with rate limits and store only the chosen name and coordinates, never the search history. 3. Share links are unguessable, revocable tokens that render a read-only view; they must never reveal other trips or reach any mutation endpoint. 4. Shifting a trip’s start date moves every day and its places together while preserving their relative order. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Trip, Day, Place, PackingItem, ShareLink. 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, Alpine, 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 OpenStreetMap tiles and geocoding API. 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 Make share links unguessable, revocable, and strictly read-only, and never expose the owner’s other trips through a shared page. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given the traveler drags a place from day three to day one, both days show the correct order after a full page refresh. 2. Given a companion opens a revoked share link, the page explains it is gone and exposes nothing about the trip. 3. Given a place lookup fails or times out, the place can still be saved with a name and note, and the pin added later. 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 flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Tripsheet”, a deliberately focused alternative to Wanderlog. 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 traveler organizing a trip for a small group. Primary outcome: plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Wanderlog. 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 traveler creates a trip with dates, adds places to each day with notes and map pins, and drags day two’s dinner ahead of the museum visit. 2. The traveler builds a packing checklist, ticks items off during the week before departure, and adds a forgotten adapter from a phone. 3. The traveler shares a read-only link; a companion opens it without an account, sees the current itinerary and pins, and never encounters an edit control. 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. Trips list: upcoming and past trips with dates, cover color, place counts, and a create-trip action. 2. Itinerary: day columns with ordered places, notes, drag handles for reordering days and places, and an add-place form with pin lookup. 3. Map view: pins for every place colored by day, a selected-place card with notes, and a fit-to-trip zoom. 4. Packing and sharing: the checklist with checked state and quick add, plus share-link creation, copy, and revoke controls. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary 2. places with notes, addresses, and map pins 3. drag to reorder days and the places within them 4. a packing checklist per trip 5. a read-only share link for travel companions DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Keep day and place order as explicit integer positions updated atomically on drag, so reordering never duplicates or drops an item. 2. Geocode place lookups server-side with rate limits and store only the chosen name and coordinates, never the search history. 3. Share links are unguessable, revocable tokens that render a read-only view; they must never reveal other trips or reach any mutation endpoint. 4. Shifting a trip’s start date moves every day and its places together while preserving their relative order. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Trip, Day, Place, PackingItem, ShareLink. 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, Alpine, 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 OpenStreetMap tiles and geocoding API. 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 Make share links unguessable, revocable, and strictly read-only, and never expose the owner’s other trips through a shared page. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given the traveler drags a place from day three to day one, both days show the correct order after a full page refresh. 2. Given a companion opens a revoked share link, the page explains it is gone and exposes nothing about the trip. 3. Given a place lookup fails or times out, the place can still be saved with a name and note, and the pin added later. 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 flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Tripsheet”, a deliberately focused alternative to Wanderlog. 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 traveler organizing a trip for a small group. Primary outcome: plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Wanderlog. 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 traveler creates a trip with dates, adds places to each day with notes and map pins, and drags day two’s dinner ahead of the museum visit. 2. The traveler builds a packing checklist, ticks items off during the week before departure, and adds a forgotten adapter from a phone. 3. The traveler shares a read-only link; a companion opens it without an account, sees the current itinerary and pins, and never encounters an edit control. 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. Trips list: upcoming and past trips with dates, cover color, place counts, and a create-trip action. 2. Itinerary: day columns with ordered places, notes, drag handles for reordering days and places, and an add-place form with pin lookup. 3. Map view: pins for every place colored by day, a selected-place card with notes, and a fit-to-trip zoom. 4. Packing and sharing: the checklist with checked state and quick add, plus share-link creation, copy, and revoke controls. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary 2. places with notes, addresses, and map pins 3. drag to reorder days and the places within them 4. a packing checklist per trip 5. a read-only share link for travel companions DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Keep day and place order as explicit integer positions updated atomically on drag, so reordering never duplicates or drops an item. 2. Geocode place lookups server-side with rate limits and store only the chosen name and coordinates, never the search history. 3. Share links are unguessable, revocable tokens that render a read-only view; they must never reveal other trips or reach any mutation endpoint. 4. Shifting a trip’s start date moves every day and its places together while preserving their relative order. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Trip, Day, Place, PackingItem, ShareLink. 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, Alpine, 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 OpenStreetMap tiles and geocoding API. 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 Make share links unguessable, revocable, and strictly read-only, and never expose the owner’s other trips through a shared page. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given the traveler drags a place from day three to day one, both days show the correct order after a full page refresh. 2. Given a companion opens a revoked share link, the page explains it is gone and exposes nothing about the trip. 3. Given a place lookup fails or times out, the place can still be saved with a name and note, and the pin added later. 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 flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Tripsheet”, a deliberately focused alternative to Wanderlog. 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 traveler organizing a trip for a small group. Primary outcome: plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Wanderlog. 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 traveler creates a trip with dates, adds places to each day with notes and map pins, and drags day two’s dinner ahead of the museum visit. 2. The traveler builds a packing checklist, ticks items off during the week before departure, and adds a forgotten adapter from a phone. 3. The traveler shares a read-only link; a companion opens it without an account, sees the current itinerary and pins, and never encounters an edit control. 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. Trips list: upcoming and past trips with dates, cover color, place counts, and a create-trip action. 2. Itinerary: day columns with ordered places, notes, drag handles for reordering days and places, and an add-place form with pin lookup. 3. Map view: pins for every place colored by day, a selected-place card with notes, and a fit-to-trip zoom. 4. Packing and sharing: the checklist with checked state and quick add, plus share-link creation, copy, and revoke controls. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary 2. places with notes, addresses, and map pins 3. drag to reorder days and the places within them 4. a packing checklist per trip 5. a read-only share link for travel companions DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Keep day and place order as explicit integer positions updated atomically on drag, so reordering never duplicates or drops an item. 2. Geocode place lookups server-side with rate limits and store only the chosen name and coordinates, never the search history. 3. Share links are unguessable, revocable tokens that render a read-only view; they must never reveal other trips or reach any mutation endpoint. 4. Shifting a trip’s start date moves every day and its places together while preserving their relative order. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Trip, Day, Place, PackingItem, ShareLink. 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, Alpine, 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 OpenStreetMap tiles and geocoding API. 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 Make share links unguessable, revocable, and strictly read-only, and never expose the owner’s other trips through a shared page. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given the traveler drags a place from day three to day one, both days show the correct order after a full page refresh. 2. Given a companion opens a revoked share link, the page explains it is gone and exposes nothing about the trip. 3. Given a place lookup fails or times out, the place can still be saved with a name and note, and the pin added later. 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 flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Wanderlog? Fine. These are the peculiar sub-problems hiding inside it — the parts that are actually interesting to build. Each one is a standalone prompt, scoped to an evening, no strings attached to the full build.
The drag-and-drop that survives a page refreshInteger positions, atomic moves, and no place ever duplicated or dropped.
Build drag-to-reorder for a trip itinerary: days reorder within a trip, places reorder within a day, and places move between days. Store order as explicit integer positions. The dangerous operation is the cross-day move, remove from day three, insert at position two of day one, which touches two lists and must be one atomic transaction: close the gap in the source day, shift the target day's items down, insert the moved place, all or nothing. Half-applied moves create duplicates or vanish a dinner reservation. Renumber cleanly rather than accumulating fractional positions forever, and make position sequences per day gapless after every operation. On the client, apply the move optimistically for responsiveness, but reconcile with the server's answer and roll back visibly on failure. Two edits from two devices should resolve by last-write-wins without corrupting either day's sequence. Done when: a place dragged from day three to day one shows the correct order in both days after a hard refresh, no operation ever yields duplicate or missing positions, and a failed move rolls back visibly.
The share link that sees one trip and touches nothingRead-only means the token cannot reach a single mutation endpoint.
Build read-only share links for a trip planner. A traveler shares an itinerary with companions who have no accounts. Each link is an unguessable high-entropy token mapping to exactly one trip, rendering a view with the full itinerary, notes, and map pins, and zero edit affordances. Hiding buttons isn't the security; the server is: share-token requests may hit only the read path for that one trip, and every mutation endpoint rejects the token outright. Verify each fetched resource belongs to the token's trip, so no crafted request walks sideways to the owner's other trips. Revocation is immediate: the next request with a dead token gets a page saying the link is gone, leaking nothing, no trip name, no dates, no owner. Owners can hold several live links per trip and revoke them individually. Keep shared pages out of search engines with noindex. Done when: a companion sees the current itinerary without an account, a revoked link reveals nothing on its very next request, and no request signed only by a share token can modify or enumerate anything.
The date shift that moves eleven days without a shuffleTrip slips a week? Every day, place, and pin slides together.
Build trip date shifting for a day-by-day itinerary. The flight moved: a trip planned for March 10 through 14 now starts March 17. Re-entering five days of plans is the failure you're preventing. Model days as ordered slots relative to the trip rather than hard-coded calendar dates, or equivalently, shift every day's date by the same delta in one transaction, so places, notes, and pins ride along untouched and relative order is preserved exactly. Cover the adjacent cases: extending a trip appends empty days at the end; shortening one requires explicit confirmation about the days being cut, never silent deletion of their places, offer to move orphaned places to the last remaining day. A shift across a daylight-saving boundary must not slip a day, so do the arithmetic on calendar dates, not on epoch-seconds offsets. Live share links show the new dates immediately. Done when: shifting a 5-day trip forward a week moves every day and place intact, shortening warns before anything is discarded, and date math survives DST transitions.
The geocoder that fails without losing the restaurantRate-limited proxy, debounced lookups, and places that save fine with no pin.
Build place lookup for a trip planner backed by a free geocoding API. The user types a place name and picks from suggested matches, each carrying a display name and coordinates for the map pin. Proxy the geocoding service server-side, never from the browser: free services enforce strict rate limits and attribution, so debounce input, cache repeated queries, and queue requests to respect the ceiling. Store only what the user chose, name and coordinates, never the search-history trail of queries that led there. Design for failure as a feature: when a lookup times out, returns nothing, or the quota is exhausted, the place still saves with its name and notes, unpinned, and shows a small add-pin-later affordance instead of blocking the itinerary on a third-party hiccup. On the map, render pins colored by day and a fit-to-trip zoom that frames every pin; places without coordinates just sit out the map without breaking it. Done when: lookups stay under the provider's rate limit through a debounced typing storm, a failed lookup never blocks saving a place, and pins added later appear in the day's color.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Wanderlog?
A basic version — trips, daily itinerary, map pins, share link — takes about 8 hours. Roughly 3 days gets you a solid v1 with route times, budgets, attachments, packing templates. Matching everything Wanderlog really does (flight imports, mobile apps, recommendations, route optimization) is closer to 3 months+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Wanderlog cost if I keep subscribing?
Wanderlog runs $5.99–$9.99 per month on public paid plans, which is $72–$120 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Wanderlog 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, Alpine, D1. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal Wanderlog replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: trips with dates and a day-by-day itinerary; places with notes, addresses, and map pins; drag to reorder days and the places within them; a packing checklist per trip; a read-only share link for travel companions. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build flight and hotel imports, collaborative editing, expense splitting, recommendations, or route optimization.
Does this build also replace TripIt?
Yes. Wanderlog, TripIt all solve the same core job — plan each day, keep places and notes together, and share the plan without asking anyone to sign up. 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.