# Build brief — a focused alternative to Dailygram

> **Verdict:** Partly, if you narrow it · **Buildability:** 53/100 · **Category:** Social Media
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/dailygram
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Dailygram. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**Dailygram** — Turn selected public social profiles into a daily AI email digest. It currently costs $10/mo.

The personal digest pipeline is a realistic contained build if you bring feeds or a data provider. Reliable ingestion from Instagram, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn is not a one-shot project: access restrictions, changing page formats, rate limits, and connector maintenance are the product's durable edge.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Dailygram that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.

## What you are building

Poll user-supplied feeds for selected public profiles, deduplicate new posts, summarize them with an LLM, and send one scheduled email digest.

- Draft, queue, and track content for the few networks you actually use.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- RSS, Atom, or JSON feeds for selected profiles.
- Always-on machine or small server.

### Data and integrations

- OpenAI API key.
- SMTP credentials.

Each of these needs a real account, credential, or quota. Set them up before writing feature code.

### Non-functional

- Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
- Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.
- Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.
- Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.

## Implementation brief

Build me a personal social-profile email digest to replace Dailygram. Requirements:

- Node 22 + Express + better-sqlite3, with a localhost admin page for adding,
  editing, pausing, and deleting monitored profiles.
- Each profile stores network, handle, source URL, and an RSS, Atom, or JSON feed
  URL. Keep one small adapter per feed format and validate each feed when saved.
- Poll enabled feeds every 6 hours with node-cron, normalize posts to one schema,
  and deduplicate by source ID, then canonical URL, before inserting into SQLite.
- Summarize only new posts with the OpenAI SDK: one sentence per post plus a
  five-bullet digest overview. Read OPENAI_API_KEY and model name from .env.
- Send one responsive HTML email per day through Nodemailer and SMTP credentials
  from .env, grouped by profile with timestamps and links to original posts.
- The dashboard shows last poll, next digest, source errors, and a preview of the
  exact pending email. Add a Run now button for polling and another for sending.
- Retry failed fetches and email sends three times with backoff, preserve the error
  message, and never mark a digest sent until SMTP accepts it.
- Bind to localhost only. No accounts, billing, telemetry, or cloud control plane;
  all data stays in SQLite except feed, OpenAI, and SMTP requests.
- Out of scope: logging into or scraping social networks, bypassing rate limits,
  mobile apps, and multi-user collaboration. Do not pretend feeds always exist.
- Include tests for normalization, deduplication, and digest selection, plus a README
  covering setup, .env keys, database backup, and the feed-access limitation.

## Delivery standard

- Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.
- Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.
- Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.
- Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.
- Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.
- Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.
- Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.
- Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.

## Acceptance criteria

- [ ] A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.
- [ ] The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.
- [ ] Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.
- [ ] The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.
- [ ] Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.
- [ ] No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.

## Non-goals

Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:

- Maintained ingestion across four social networks.
- Resilience to rate limits, blocks, and page changes.
- Automatic profile discovery and source setup.
- Managed email delivery and monitoring.
- Reliability at the vendor's scale is an operations problem, not a prompt.
- Connectors, OAuth flows, and vendor API changes require constant upkeep.

## What you still own after launch

- Secure credentials, rotate secrets, and handle provider rate limits.
- Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
- Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
- Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
- Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.

## Risk

**Operational risk.** The code is achievable; dependable data, integrations, and ongoing operations are the real cost.

Editorial confidence in this assessment: high. No independent one-shot implementation is linked yet.

## Prior art

Working open-source software you can read, fork, or borrow from before starting:

- [RSSHub](https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub) — Open-source RSS generator with routes for many sites and services
- [Huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn) — Self-hosted agents that watch sources and build automated digests

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Generated by [Can It Be Vibe Coded?](https://www.canitbevibecoded.com) · Full report: https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/dailygram