# Build brief — a focused alternative to WebinarJam

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

## Context

**WebinarJam** — Run a modest live webinar with registration and clear capacity limits. It currently costs $49/mo.

A consolation build is possible, but the paid product's decisive value sits outside a solo rebuild. For WebinarJam, run a modest live webinar with registration and clear capacity limits. The hard boundary is large-event media, landing pages, reminders, replays, analytics, and support, plus real-time media infrastructure and reliability.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of WebinarJam 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 modest live webinar room with registration and clear capacity limits, issue signed room links, and keep recordings only when every participant is clearly informed.

- 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

- Public server with strong bandwidth.
- Domain and TLS.
- TURN server.
- Docker.
- Explicit participant consent for recording.

### 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 WebinarJam in an empty repository.
Use Docker Compose, Jitsi Meet, a small Next.js 15 control panel, PostgreSQL, and TURN; do not offer alternative stacks.
The core loop is: run a modest live webinar room with registration and clear capacity limits, issue signed room links, and keep recordings only when every participant is clearly informed.
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.
Deploy Jitsi Meet through pinned Docker images and configure a dedicated TURN service.
Build an owner panel for rooms, signed invitations, expiry, lobby mode, and participant limits.
Show connection diagnostics for camera, microphone, browser, bandwidth, and TURN reachability.
Make recording disabled by default and require an on-screen consent state for every participant.
Store room metadata and audit events, but do not store media unless explicitly enabled.
Add health checks, bandwidth dashboards, backup, restore, upgrade, and incident instructions.
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 a global media edge network.
Deliberately leave out public webinar scale and telephony.
Deliberately leave out regulated recording, enterprise compliance, and guaranteed support.
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:

- Large-event media, landing pages, reminders, replays, analytics, and support.
- Global low-latency media network.
- Dial-in and telephony.
- Large webinars.
- 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:

- [Jitsi Meet](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet) — Widely deployed open-source video-conferencing platform

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