# Build brief — a focused alternative to Lumar

> **Verdict:** Not faithfully · **Buildability:** 31/100 · **Category:** SEO Marketing
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/lumar
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Lumar. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**Lumar** — Run a limited technical crawl and maintain an auditable issue history. It currently costs Variable pricing.

A consolation build is possible, but the paid product's decisive value sits outside a solo rebuild. For Lumar, run a limited technical crawl and maintain an auditable issue history. The hard boundary is enterprise crawl scale, monitoring, analytics, governance, and consulting support, plus crawl scale, rule depth, and operational polish.

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

Run a limited technical crawl of a user-owned site, inspect HTML and rendered pages, explain prioritized issues, maintain an auditable issue history, and export a reproducible audit.

- Automate a bounded research or reporting workflow using permitted data sources.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- Python 3.12.
- Playwright browsers.
- Permission to crawl the target site.
- Local disk space.

### 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 Lumar in an empty repository.
Use Python 3.12, FastAPI, SQLite, Playwright, and an HTMX interface; do not offer alternative stacks.
The core loop is: run a limited technical crawl of a user-owned site, inspect HTML and rendered pages, explain prioritized issues, maintain an auditable issue history, and export a reproducible audit.
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.
Require an explicit ownership or permission acknowledgement before a crawl starts.
Respect robots.txt, rate limits, canonical URLs, nofollow, redirects, and a configurable URL cap.
Collect status, title, description, headings, canonical, robots, links, images, structured data, and rendered text.
Detect duplicates, orphan candidates, broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, and indexability conflicts.
Show every issue with affected URLs, evidence, severity, and a concrete remediation note.
Export crawl data and issues to CSV plus a self-contained HTML report.
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 crawling sites without permission.
Deliberately leave out web-scale backlink or keyword datasets.
Deliberately leave out automated changes to production websites.
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:

- Enterprise crawl scale, monitoring, analytics, governance, and consulting support.
- Massive hosted crawl capacity.
- Proprietary scoring.
- Continuous monitoring.
- Reliability at the vendor's scale is an operations problem, not a prompt.
- The last 20 percent is sync, migration fidelity, speed, and edge cases.

## 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

**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:

- [SEOnaut](https://github.com/stjudewashere/seonaut) — Open-source technical SEO auditing application

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