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

> Projects, tasks, time. Together.

- Site: https://risecalendar.com
- Category: Productivity & Calendar SaaS
- Platforms: Web app
- Verdict: **Serious undertaking** (38/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 3-5 months of part-time work

## Verdict

Build a personal web-based task calendar subset rather than attempting to replicate the full multi-platform sync engine, because calendar protocol edge cases and canvas rendering require immense engineering effort.

Replicating Rise as a personal-use tool means confronting calendar sync hell—handling recurring event exceptions, timezone shifts, and token refreshes across Google and Microsoft graphs is notoriously painful. A solo developer can build a gorgeous Next.js wrapper with local database tasks and a mock calendar grid in a couple of weeks, but achieving the fluid canvas and reliable bidirectional sync that Rise spent four years refining will consume months of frustrating debugging.

### What you can't replicate

- The exact four years of bug-fixing on multi-way calendar protocol edge cases
- Native desktop window management and system integration across macOS and Windows

## What it does

A destination calendar combined with task management and project tracking, featuring focus-time protection and calendar synchronization.

### Core features

- Destination calendar canvas with multi-way calendar sync (Google, Outlook)
- Integrated task management and project tracking inside the calendar grid
- Automated focus-time protection and time auditing reports
- Extensive keyboard shortcut navigation and horizontal scrolling interface
- Time-blocking and scheduling optimization primitives

## The business

### Pricing

- Free Tier: Free — Core individual calendar and task features offered during operation.
- Team Tier: Unknown — Paid tier targeting teams before the product shutdown in March 2025.

### Funding

€2.5M raised.
- Pre-seed (2021)
Investors: Lachy Groom, Stewart Butterfield, Adriaan Mol

Founded 2020.
Team size: 6 core members.

## The hard parts

- Bidirectional calendar synchronization across external APIs handling recurring events and timezones
- Building a high-performance custom calendar canvas from scratch
- Managing state parity and smooth UI performance across dense time grids

## How to vibe code Rise

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Runtime environment for building and running the full-stack web application.
- GitHub (free): Version control and deployment pipeline integration.

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class multi-file agentic coding tool for scaffolding complex full-stack web architectures and debugging calendar logic.
- Cursor: Ideal for iterative UI refinement on the dense calendar canvas and component styling.

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js with Tailwind CSS and custom calendar grid components
- Backend: Next.js Server Actions and API routes
- Database: Neon (Serverless Postgres)
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: None (personal use clone)
- Other: Vercel AI SDK, PostHog

### Hosting

- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js web application and serverless API endpoints): $0-20/mo
- Neon (Serverless Postgres database for tasks, projects, and synced calendar metadata): $0/mo

### Build guide

1. **Project Scaffolding and Database Schema** — Initialize the Next.js project with Tailwind CSS, configure Neon Postgres with Drizzle ORM, and set up better-auth for single-user authentication.

```
Initialize a new Next.js project using App Router, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Set up Drizzle ORM connected to a Neon Postgres database. Define database schemas for users, calendars, events, projects, and tasks with proper foreign key relationships and timestamps. Implement better-auth with email/password authentication and secure session handling. Create a clean dashboard layout shell with a sidebar navigation for calendar, projects, and settings. Ensure clean separation of concerns and robust error handling across database transactions.
```

2. **Calendar Canvas UI and Grid Engine** — Build the core destination calendar canvas supporting day, week, and month views with custom time-slot rendering and keyboard navigation shortcuts.

```
Build a high-performance calendar canvas component in React supporting day, week, and month views. Implement time grid rendering with 30-minute intervals, current time indicator lines, and drag-and-drop or click-to-create event interactions. Add keyboard shortcut navigation (e.g., 't' for today, 'w' for week view, 'j/k' for navigation) using custom hook bindings. Ensure smooth scrolling performance and responsive layout adaptation for desktop viewports.
```

3. **Task Management and Project Integration** — Implement inline task lists and project boards that embed directly into the calendar canvas, allowing tasks to be scheduled into time slots.

```
Create a task management subsystem with projects, lists, subtasks, and completion states. Implement an inline task sidebar and embed task checkboxes directly into calendar event titles and day slots using parsing logic (e.g. bracket syntax like '[ ]'). Build a drag-and-drop mechanism to assign tasks onto specific time blocks in the calendar canvas. Store task metadata linked to user profiles and update UI reactively using server actions.
```

4. **External Calendar Sync Integration** — Integrate Google Calendar and Outlook API connectors to pull external events into the unified canvas and handle bidirectional synchronization.

```
Implement OAuth integration for Google Calendar and Microsoft Graph APIs to fetch external calendar events. Build a background synchronization routine that maps external events into the local database schema, handling recurring event rules, timezones, and conflict detection. Create UI controls to toggle calendar visibility, select sync frequency, and view connection status without crashing when API rate limits or token expirations occur.
```

5. **Focus Protection and Time Auditing Reports** — Add time auditing features that analyze calendar fragmentation and compute focus-time protection blocks.

```
Develop a time analytics and reporting engine that calculates focus time, meeting load, and fragmentation scores from user event data. Build interactive report views with charts showing time spent in meetings versus deep work. Implement an automated 'FocusGuard' feature that scans schedules for fragmented gaps and suggests or auto-blocks focus time slots on the calendar canvas.
```

6. **Polish, Error Boundaries, and Deployment** — Add error boundaries, polish keyboard flows, configure production deployment on Vercel, and verify end-to-end functionality.

```
Add comprehensive error boundaries, loading skeletons, and toast notifications across all asynchronous actions in the application. Implement robust input validation using Zod schemas for all forms and API endpoints. Configure environment variables for authentication and calendar OAuth credentials. Prepare the codebase for deployment on Vercel, ensuring clean build logs, optimized asset caching, and proper database migration execution.
```

### Cost vs paying

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

- Custom domain (optional): $12/yr
- AI coding tools subscription: $20
- Total: ~$32 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Vercel Hobby / Pro hosting: $0-20/mo
- Neon Database: $0/mo
- Total: ~$0-20/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: Free (Shut down)
- Build time: 60-90 hours
- AI tool credits: $20
- Break-even: N/A (Product shut down)

## Sources

- [Rise Calendar Official Shutdown Announcement](https://risecalendar.com)