Can I vibecode Google Drive?

NOT REALLY · don't bother

price $1.99/moyou'd save $23.88/yrbuild time a weekendcategory 💾 cloud storagereplaced by 0 people

You can absolutely build a file upload page with folders, search, and share links in an afternoon. What you cannot build is durable multi-region storage that has not lost a byte in fifteen years, a sync daemon that survives sleep, flaky wifi, and two machines editing the same folder, and native apps on every platform your family owns. The cost side is brutal too: two terabytes of redundant storage plus egress will run you more than the consumer plan, before you have written a line of code. Add that half the value is not storage at all, it is that everyone you share with already has an account and Docs opens in one click. This is infrastructure wearing a UI, and infrastructure is the part you are paying for.

the prompt

Build a self-hosted personal file locker called "Vault". Single Node.js service, no framework soup.

Stack, non negotiable:
- Node 20 with Fastify and TypeScript
- SQLite via better-sqlite3 for metadata
- Files stored on local disk under DATA_DIR, sharded by the first two chars of a content hash
- Server rendered HTML with Nunjucks plus a little vanilla JS, no React
- Single admin user, password hash in .env, cookie session

In scope:
- Upload via drag and drop, chunked, resumable, files up to 5 GB, using tus protocol or a simple range based chunk endpoint you write
- Content addressed storage: hash on upload, dedupe identical bytes, keep every version of a path
- Folder tree browsing, rename, move, soft delete with a 30 day trash table and a purge command
- Search on filename, extension, size range, and date, all from SQLite
- Share links: random 22 char token, optional expiry, optional download limit, optional password, served from a read only route that streams with correct Content-Type and range support
- Thumbnails for images and PDF first pages using sharp and pdftoppm if present, skipped gracefully if not
- A "vault backup" CLI command that rsyncs DATA_DIR and dumps the SQLite file, plus a "vault verify" that rehashes everything and reports drift

Out of scope, do not attempt:
- Desktop or mobile sync clients
- Multi user accounts, sharing between accounts, permissions matrices
- Document editing or previews beyond thumbnails
- Any cloud service, telemetry, or analytics

Requirements:
- All config in .env: PORT, DATA_DIR, ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH, SESSION_SECRET, PUBLIC_BASE_URL
- docker-compose.yml with one service and one named volume
- Integration tests covering chunked upload, resume after interrupt, dedupe, share link expiry, and trash purge
- README that states plainly: this is one disk, it is not a backup, here is the restore drill, run it once a quarter

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR

why people still pay

Because storage is a promise, not a feature. Paying a few dollars a month means you are not the person on call when a disk dies, a sync loop eats a folder, or your share links stop resolving during a family emergency. On top of that, most people's Drive is load bearing for other people: shared folders, Docs links pasted into email threads years ago, phone backups. Replacing the upload form is easy, replacing the promise and the graph of links pointing at it is not.

what you lose

xReal sync clients on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, including offline files and conflict resolution

xGoogle Docs, Sheets, and Slides opening inline with live multiplayer editing

xDurability and availability engineering you will never match, plus versioning and trash that actually works

xSharing with people who already have accounts, plus granular permissions and audit trails

xOCR and content search inside PDFs and images, and the mobile scanner

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd rather

Nothing worth pointing at. That's why the prompt exists.

share on X ↗"I just replaced Google Drive ($1.99/mo) with one prompt"