# How to Vibe Code Your Own Maze (and Stop Paying for It)

> User Research and Testing Platform

- Site: https://maze.co
- Category: Product Discovery & User Research SaaS
- Verdict: **Serious undertaking** (45/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 3-4 months of part-time work

## Verdict

Build a personal-use subset of the study builder, survey logic, and AI synthesis dashboard — but keep paying for Maze if you need the 6M+ participant recruitment panel.

Replicating Maze as a solo developer means building several complex subsystems: a visual study editor, a prototype testing engine that parses Figma layouts and hot zones, an event-tracking ingestion pipeline for session analytics, and an AI moderation engine with voice streaming. While the study builder and reporting UI can be vibecoded swiftly using Next.js and Vercel AI SDK, orchestrating low-latency conversational AI and real-time interaction heatmaps is a serious multi-month engineering lift. The true moat—access to millions of vetted participants—is completely impossible to clone.

### What you can't replicate

- Global participant panel of 6M+ vetted B2B and consumer testers
- Enterprise SOC 2 Type II compliance and security governance
- Native mobile companion app recording infrastructure for iOS and Android

## What it does

Connect everyone to users with our end-to-end research platform for prototype testing, surveys, tree testing, card sorting, and AI-moderated interviews.

### Core features

- Study Builder with various question and task types (surveys, card sort, tree test, prototype test)
- Figma prototype integration via embedding and hotspot parsing
- Unmoderated session recording (clicks, mouse tracks, time-on-task, drop-off paths)
- AI Moderator for autonomous conversational interviews with audio streams
- Participant management and screeners
- Automated reports with video clip generation and synthesis
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for external AI tool integration
- In-product prompt snippet embedding for live web apps

## The business

### Pricing

- Free: $0/mo — Basic studies for individuals and small tests
- Starter: $99/mo — For small teams running unmoderated tests
- Enterprise: Custom — For organizations requiring advanced security and AI moderation

### Funding

$60M raised.
- Seed
- Series A
- Series B (€38M)
Investors: Amplify Partners, Felicis Ventures, Emergence Capital, Atlassian Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Zoom Ventures, Seedcamp

Founded 2018.
Team size: 150-170.

## The hard parts

- Figma design API synchronization and real-time hotspot hit-testing across scaled artboards
- Event streaming ingestion pipeline capturing high-frequency click/cursor metrics from concurrent unmoderated sessions
- Low-latency conversational AI orchestration loop managing voice transcription, goal evaluation, and audio generation
- GDPR-compliant video storage, masking, and automated transcription indexing

## How to vibe code Maze

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Runtime for running the full-stack web application
- GitHub (free): Source code repository and CI/CD deployment connection
- OpenAI API Key (pay-per-use): Powers study generation and transcript synthesis

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class terminal agent for scaffolding complex multi-file full-stack features and API integrations
- Cursor: Essential for iterative UI component styling and inspecting component diffs

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js
- Backend: Next.js API Routes
- Database: Neon
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: none
- Other: Vercel AI SDK, Resend, Deepgram, ElevenLabs

### Hosting

- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js web application and edge API routes): $0-20/mo
- Neon (Serverless Postgres database for studies, questions, responses, and metrics): $0/mo

### Build guide

1. **Project Scaffolding and Database Schema** — Initialize the Next.js app with Tailwind CSS, configure Neon Postgres connection, and set up better-auth tables.

```
Initialize a new Next.js project with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and App Router. Set up Drizzle ORM connected to Neon Postgres. Create database schemas for users, workspaces, studies (title, description, status), blocks (question, card_sort, tree_test, prototype_test), and responses. Implement better-auth for email/password authentication with secure session handling. Add a clean dashboard shell with sidebar navigation for studies, participants, and reports.
```

2. **Study Builder & Block Editor** — Build a modular study builder interface allowing creators to add, reorder, and configure different research block types.

```
Build a drag-and-drop study builder interface in Next.js using shadcn/ui components. Allow creators to add blocks: Welcome screen, Multiple Choice Survey, Open Question, Card Sorting, Tree Testing, and Prototype Testing. Each block should have a configuration panel for questions, options, and required flags. Persist block states instantly to Neon Postgres via server actions.
```

3. **Figma Prototype Integration & Hotspot Testing** — Implement prototype test rendering by embedding Figma frames and defining clickable hotspots to record interaction paths.

```
Create a prototype testing participant view that allows embedding Figma frames or uploaded images. Build an interactive editor mode where researchers can draw bounding-box hotspots over image areas and designate target destination screens. In participant test mode, record click coordinates, misclicks, success/failure status, and time-on-task, saving metrics to the database.
```

4. **AI Moderator & Audio Interview Simulator** — Integrate Vercel AI SDK and ElevenLabs/Deepgram for an automated conversational interview mode driven by study goals.

```
Build an AI-moderated interview screen using Vercel AI SDK and the OpenAI API. Allow researchers to input study goals and a discussion guide. Implement a live voice interface where participants speak, audio is transcribed via Deepgram, processed by the LLM agent to generate goal-aligned follow-up probes, and spoken back using ElevenLabs text-to-speech. Save full transcripts and audio clips to the database.
```

5. **Analytics Dashboard & Automated Reporting** — Aggregate session metrics, generate quantitative usability charts, and synthesize qualitative summaries using LLMs.

```
Build an automated reporting dashboard for completed studies. Compute and display quantitative metrics including success rates, misclick rates, average time-on-task, and survey distributions using Recharts. Integrate an AI synthesis button that calls the LLM with all participant transcripts and open responses to generate grouped thematic insights and extract key video/text quote highlights.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- Domain name: $12 one-time
- AI API starting credits: $20 one-time
- Total: ~$32 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Vercel Hosting: $0-20/mo
- Neon Postgres: $0/mo
- OpenAI & ElevenLabs API usage: ~$10/mo
- Total: ~$10-30/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $99/mo (Starter) to $1,000+/mo (Enterprise)
- Build time: 60-80 hours
- AI tool credits: $20 (Claude Pro) + ~$15 API credits
- Break-even: Immediate if building for personal/internal portfolio use; impossible to break even on utility compared to paying for panel recruitment.

## Sources

- [Maze Official Website](https://maze.co)
- [Tracxn Company Profile - Maze](https://tracxn.com)
- [Maze Pricing Analysis 2026](https://checkthat.ai)