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← Can you vibe-code it?

Can You Vibe-Code Borlabs Cookie?

Not really Medium confidence

Real-world usage 271.2K+ live sites #28 by usage View plugin details →
from €39/yr What it costs
One sitting To get an MVP working
~8 h/yr To keep it alive, forever
26% Of it is just code

What you’re actually buying

26% code you could commission 74% somebody running something

You could build: Consent storage, script blocking and a per-service opt-in UI.

What you’d still be missing: The service blocklist and the consent copy have to stay correct in German law specifically. Getting that wrong is a fine, not a bug.

Compliance Live data Maintenance

Is it worth building?

About 2 hours to get a working version (one sitting), then roughly 8 hours a year keeping it alive. So year one is about 10 hours of your time — both figures assume you’re using an agent for the maintenance too, not just the build.

Against $39 a year for the licence. At $50/hour that’s $500 of your time in year one — so it pays off once you run it on about 13 sites, because the licence is per site and your build isn’t.

13 sites — break even +$514/yr $0 -$461/yr 1 13 26 sites you'd run it on (maintenance at $50/hr)
If your time is worth Year one Each year after Sites to break even
$25/hr $250 $200 7
$50/hr $500 $400 13
$100/hr $1,000 $800 26
$150/hr $1,500 $1,200 39

Year one only, and it assumes the 74% above is worth nothing to you. That is the assumption most likely to be wrong — read the “still missing” line again before you decide.

The prompt

A starting point, not a magic spell. Expect to iterate — and to be told what it skipped.

Starter prompt

Don’t feel like building it?

Free or open-source, finished, and already doing the job.

0 people say they built this instead

Self-reported and unverified — one tap per person, roughly. Treat it as a mood ring, not a statistic.

Why this list exists

“Can I just vibe-code this?” has become a reasonable question to ask before renewing a licence. For most SaaS the answer is a straight yes or no. For WordPress plugins it usually isn’t, because a premium licence is rarely paying for source code alone.

Ask an agent for a security plugin and you’ll get a firewall and a file scanner in an afternoon. What you won’t get is the rule that shipped this morning for the vulnerability disclosed last night — that’s a research team, and it’s the entire reason the product works. Ask for a caching plugin and you’ll get page caching, minification and lazy-loading. What you won’t get is the eight years of exclusion rules that stop it breaking somebody’s checkout.

So instead of a verdict, every plugin above is split in two: the share an agent could plausibly build for you, and the share that only exists because a vendor is running something on an ongoing basis — a live data feed, servers doing the work, a legal review, or an integration matrix kept alive against other companies’ breaking changes.

How to read the score

The percentage is the answer to one question: what would you still be missing the day after the agent finished? A low score means the product really is mostly code, and building it yourself is a fair trade. A high score means you’d finish the build and still need to buy the thing that made it useful.

The baseline is one competent developer with a good agent and a couple of weekends — not a team, and not a year. Scores are editorial judgement rather than measurement, and they’re deliberately arguable. If you think a call is wrong, that’s the interesting conversation.

Ranking, prices and live-site counts come from the same daily data as the rest of the site — see the premium plugin ranking for how those are gathered.