# Build brief — a focused alternative to Firstbase

> **Verdict:** Not faithfully · **Buildability:** 20/100 · **Category:** Legal
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/firstbase
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Firstbase. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**Firstbase** — Track company-formation tasks and documents without filing or acting as an agent. It currently costs Variable pricing.

A consolation build is possible, but the paid product's decisive value sits outside a solo rebuild. For Firstbase, track company-formation tasks and documents without filing or acting as an agent. The hard boundary is formation, registered agent, banking partners, tax workflows, mail, and support, plus expert judgment, compliance, and regulated services.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Firstbase 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

Track company-formation tasks and documents, fill clearly labeled templates from collected facts, track versions and approvals, and state that outputs require qualified review, without filing or acting as an agent.

- Build a focused single-user workflow with real persistence, search, and export.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- Self-hosted deployment.
- PostgreSQL.
- Jurisdiction-specific templates supplied by the user or counsel.
- Secure backup.

### 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 a closest honest personal substitute for Firstbase in an empty repository.
Use Next.js 15, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, and a versioned Markdown template engine; do not offer alternative stacks.
The core loop is: track company-formation tasks and documents, fill clearly labeled templates from collected facts, track versions and approvals, and state that outputs require qualified review, without filing or acting as an agent.
Make the first run work locally with one documented command.
Store all user data locally by default and make export straightforward.
Put secrets in .env, ship .env.example, and never commit credentials.
Create versioned questionnaires, reusable fact fields, conditional sections, templates, and approval states.
Show the source, jurisdiction, owner, reviewed date, and expiry date for every template.
Generate DOCX and PDF drafts with prominent draft and review-required labels.
Keep an immutable audit log of answers, template version, generation time, downloads, and approvals.
Add role-based access, retention, export, encrypted backups, and a deadline calendar.
Display legal-review warnings before generation and again before any final download.
Include clear empty, loading, success, and recoverable error states.
Add input validation, safe filenames, and graceful handling of unavailable APIs.
Write focused tests for the core transformation and one end-to-end happy path.
Create a README with setup, architecture, permissions, data location, and backup steps.
Do not add accounts, billing, telemetry, analytics, or a hosted control plane.
Do not claim to reproduce proprietary data, network liquidity, regulated access, or frontier infrastructure.
Deliberately leave out legal advice or guaranteed compliance.
Deliberately leave out government filings, identity verification, and registered-agent services.
Deliberately leave out automatic consent decisions or deployment without qualified review.
Finish by running the tests and listing the exact commands used.

## 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:

- Formation, registered agent, banking partners, tax workflows, mail, and support.
- Legal advice.
- Jurisdictional assurance.
- Filing and registered-agent network.
- Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
- Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.

## What you still own after launch

- 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.

## Risk

**High consequence.** Use this as a prototype or personal aid. Keep a qualified human and an established provider in the loop for consequential decisions.

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:

- [docassemble](https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble) — Open-source expert-system platform for guided interviews and document assembly

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