# Build brief — a focused alternative to TradingView

> **Verdict:** Not faithfully · **Buildability:** 6/100 · **Category:** Finance Accounting
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/tradingview
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from TradingView. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**TradingView** — Browser based charting, screening and alerting across stocks, futures, forex and crypto, with a scripting language and a large community of published indicators. It currently costs $14.95/mo.

The chart widget itself is not the product, and TradingView proved that by open sourcing a perfectly good one: lightweight-charts is MIT licensed and you can have candles on screen with a focused implementation. What you cannot build is the data pipe behind it. Real-time consolidated equity, futures and options feeds are licensed per exchange, per user, with entitlement checks and redistribution rules, and the free endpoints you will end up scraping are delayed, rate limited and quietly break. On top of that sits Pine Script and roughly a decade of community published indicators and strategies, plus screeners over every listed symbol, alerts that fire while your laptop is shut, and broker order routing. A local build gives you crypto in real time and equities on a delay, which is either fine or completely useless depending on your time horizon.

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

A local charting app that pulls daily and intraday candles from free public endpoints, caches them in SQLite, renders them with lightweight-charts, and polls a handful of price alerts you define yourself.

- Model a narrow bookkeeping workflow with explicit review and export steps.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- Node 20 plus.
- A machine left running if you want alerts to fire.
- Tolerance for delayed or rate limited free equity data.

### Data and integrations

- Binance or similar public API for anything that needs to be genuinely real time.

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 a local-first market charting app called "deskchart". Single user, runs on my machine, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud.

Stack, not negotiable:
- Vite + React + TypeScript for the UI
- lightweight-charts (MIT, from TradingView) for rendering candles and overlays
- A small Express + TypeScript server in the same repo as a data proxy and cache
- SQLite via better-sqlite3 for candle cache, watchlists and alerts
- pnpm workspaces, one command to run both: pnpm dev

Data:
- Crypto: Binance public REST klines endpoint, no key needed, treat this as the real-time path
- Equities and ETFs: Stooq daily CSV as the default source, with an optional adapter interface so another provider can be dropped in via .env
- Cache every fetched candle range in SQLite and only request the missing tail on reload
- Put any API keys in .env, read via a single config module, ship .env.example. Never hardcode secrets
- Print a visible "DELAYED" badge on any symbol whose source is not real time. Do not pretend otherwise

Features in scope:
- Symbol search over a locally seeded symbol list, watchlists stored in SQLite
- Candlestick chart with timeframe switcher: 1m, 5m, 1h, 1d, 1w
- Indicator overlays computed client side: SMA, EMA, VWAP, RSI and MACD in a lower pane
- Persisted horizontal price lines and trendlines per symbol, saved to SQLite
- Simple alerts: price crosses above or below a level. Server polls every 60s and fires a desktop notification via node-notifier plus a row in an alerts log
- Dark theme, keyboard shortcuts for timeframe and symbol switching

Explicitly out of scope, do not attempt:
- Any scripting language or Pine Script compatibility
- Broker connections or order entry
- Social feed, published ideas, comments
- Multi-user auth, hosted deployment, mobile apps
- Scraping any paid or authenticated data feed

Deliverables: working repo, README with setup and a blunt "data limitations" section, seed script for symbols, and vitest coverage on the indicator math and the cache-gap logic.

## 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:

- Licensed real-time exchange data for equities, futures and options; free sources are delayed and fragile.
- Pine Script and the enormous library of published indicators and strategies other people already wrote.
- Server side alerts that fire when your device is off, plus push and email delivery.
- Screeners and scanners over every listed symbol, and multi-market symbol coverage in general.
- Polished mobile and desktop apps with drawings and watchlists synced across all of them.
- Broker connections and one click order entry from the chart.

## 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.

## 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: medium. No reviewed project implementation is linked yet.

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