One link in your bio, under your own name
You put links.yoursite.com in your Instagram, TikTok or YouTube bio. Behind it, you change buttons or theme whenever you like, without touching the bio. And the address carries your name, not a vendor's.
Personal
A page of links. That's the entire app.
Linktree costs US$9–24 / mo, which is US$108–288 a year. You have two paths:
Option 1 · Install
LinkStack is Linktree or Beacons at your place: a page with your photo, your text and your buttons to Instagram, YouTube, your newsletter or your shop, on your own server and your own domain. You change the look with community themes, track your clicks with built-in stats, add a QR code and a vCard, and you can even open sign-ups to host other people's pages. It's a PHP app built on Laravel: you drop it on a regular web host or run the official Docker image, then a wizard in the browser creates the database, the admin account and the config. There's no database to install, SQLite is enough. AGPL v3 licence. The trade-off: you provide the hosting and the domain yourself.
| Criterion | LinkStack | Linktree |
|---|---|---|
| Price | US$0, forever | US$9–24 per month |
| Your address | Your domain, links.yoursite.com | linktr.ee/yourname, your domain can only redirect |
| Vendor logo at the bottom | None | Shown, removed from Pro (€13 per month) |
| Themes and colours | Community themes, free CSS | Custom themes from Pro |
| Stats | Built in, on your server | Basic on Starter, advanced on Pro |
| Code | AGPL v3, to read and fork | Closed |
You need a machine that stays on: a small VPS for a few euros, or shared PHP hosting. On a VPS, the official Docker image does all the work, and the first-run wizard wraps up in the browser.
It deploys LinkStack from the official project with Docker, connects your domain and checks that your page shows up:
Deploy LinkStack on my server (the open source, self-hosted links page, GitHub repo LinkStackOrg/LinkStack). I'm starting from scratch: I only have a Linux VPS (or a machine at home) and a domain name. Check that Docker is installed, and install it if not. Use the official Docker image linkstackorg/linkstack described in the LinkStackOrg/linkstack-docker repo: create a volume to keep my data, start the container with automatic restart, and set my domain name in the environment variables the image provides. Explain how to point my domain at the server, then set up a valid HTTPS certificate (Caddy or Nginx in front of the container, following the docs at docs.linkstack.org) and force HTTPS in the configuration. Then open my domain in the browser, guide me through the setup wizard (SQLite database, admin account), turn off public sign-ups if I'm the only user, and check that my links page displays properly with a first link. Explain each step simply, I'm a beginner.
Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.LinkStack is lightweight, an entry-level VPS is enough. Get a domain or a subdomain (links.yoursite.com) and point it to the server's IP before running the prompt: the HTTPS certificate depends on it. Already have shared PHP hosting? The latest release zip dropped at the root works too, no Docker needed.
In the admin panel, turn off public sign-ups if you're the only user (single user mode) and force HTTPS. Install updates as soon as they appear: the updater is built into the panel and takes a backup first.
You put links.yoursite.com in your Instagram, TikTok or YouTube bio. Behind it, you change buttons or theme whenever you like, without touching the bio. And the address carries your name, not a vendor's.
LinkStack counts visits and clicks in your panel, without sending anything to a third party. If you want finer data, you plug your own analytics tool (Umami, Matomo) into the page.
You open sign-ups and each person creates their page on your domain. You can approve accounts by hand if you want, and you manage everything from the admin panel. Handy for a nonprofit, an agency or a community.
Built with: PHP 65.2% · Blade 34.8%
Public GitHub repository data, captured on October 8, 2026.
Option 2 · Build
This build is aimed at one creator managing a single public profile. The goal: publish a fast, branded bio page and see which links get clicked. If you need more than that, keep paying. The point of building it yourself is to own a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not to rebuild a venture-funded roadmap.
Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Beacons and Bio Link, since they all do the same core job.
The prompt below builds a single version with what actually gets used. Everything else is left out on purpose.
| What the prompt builds | links list, avatar, one theme, drag reorder, drafts, daily click counts |
|---|---|
| What stays out | multi-tenant hosting, billing, theme marketplace, analytics |
Profile, Link, ClickEvent, Theme
Cloudflare Web Analytics
Astro, Alpine, D1
Never collect visitor fingerprints or precise location data.
Don't build multi-tenant billing, a theme marketplace, or enterprise analytics.
Pick your stack, copy the prompt and hand it to your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…).
You are building a production-ready software product named “Linkhouse”, a deliberately focused alternative to Linktree. Build a complete, usable vertical slice, not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components.
WORKING AGREEMENT
Before you write any implementation code, put together a short technical plan naming the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, key state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. When something conflicts, side with the narrow audience and the non-goals below. Choose a small, readable architecture over speculative abstraction, but never skip persistence, validation, error handling, or tests.
PRODUCT BRIEF
Primary user: one creator managing a single public profile.
Primary outcome: publish a fast, branded bio page and see which links get clicked.
Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below rather than copying the full breadth of Linktree. A first-time user should understand what to do just from the interface, with no tour or documentation.
END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS
Implement every one of these flows through the real interface and the persistent data layer:
1. The owner signs in, completes a profile, adds three links, reorders them, previews the mobile page, and publishes it to a stable public URL.
2. The owner edits a published link without changing the public URL, sees the unpublished change in the preview, and deliberately publishes the new version.
3. A visitor opens the public page, follows a featured link, and the owner later sees that click counted in the correct link and day totals.
SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Build these as coherent, responsive views. Each screen must define its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state.
1. Dashboard: profile completeness, published URL, last-published time, total recent clicks, and clear edit and view-page actions.
2. Profile editor: avatar upload, display name, short bio, theme controls, social handles, link list, inline validation, and a phone-sized live preview.
3. Link editor: label, destination URL, visibility, optional highlight style, and accessible drag handles plus move-up and move-down buttons.
4. Analytics: 7- and 30-day totals, a per-link ranking, a daily trend, and an empty state explaining when data will appear.
CORE CAPABILITIES
1. an editable profile with avatar, bio, theme, and ordered links
2. drag-to-reorder links with draft and published states
3. social icons and optional featured-link styling
4. privacy-friendly daily click counts per link
5. a mobile preview and a one-click publish flow
DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES
Treat these as product requirements enforced on the server, not as interface suggestions:
1. Allow exactly one profile in v1 and reserve its slug during setup; normalize URLs and reject unsafe protocols.
2. Keep the draft and published profile snapshots separate so that editing can never accidentally alter the live page.
3. Count a click only after resolving an active published link, and aggregate only the date, the link, and a coarse referrer category.
4. Preserve link order with explicit integer positions and update all affected positions atomically after a reorder.
DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE
Design a small relational schema centered on Profile, Link, ClickEvent, Theme. Before implementing it, document:
1. The purpose of each table, its primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes.
2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, the indexes the named screens need, and transaction boundaries for changes that touch several records.
3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who can trigger each one, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and which audit history must stay immutable.
4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files.
5. The idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where it applies.
Use migrations instead of ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and keep the named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, a disabled button, or a client-side check to protect a business invariant.
USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS
Implement only the roles the stated audience needs. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not just by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide a clear signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed separate users whenever several roles are needed so permissions can be shown and tested.
INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION
The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and trustworthy rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and a consistent place for primary actions. Start from server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must stay understandable if enhancement fails.
Start from server-rendered Astro pages and plain HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must stay understandable if either enhancement layer fails.
Design mobile layouts on purpose instead of just stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to signal state. Destructive actions need a clear scope and a confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent.
Add a footer to every page with the text “Created by aurelioagency.com”, where “aurelioagency.com” is an embedded link to https://www.aurelioagency.com that opens in a new tab. Keep it visible and do not remove it.
TECHNICAL DIRECTION
Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them.
Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules, not in route handlers or UI components. Put persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer plain HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when a failure can be reconciled clearly.
The product brief currently names Astro, Alpine, D1 as capability context. Keep any native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability that is required behind a narrow adapter suited to the chosen framework. If the core workflow truly needs native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the main execution surface instead of simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface.
Integrate with Cloudflare Web Analytics. For every integration:
- List the required environment variables in an .env.example with no real secrets.
- Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path.
- Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported.
- Keep credentials on the server, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs.
- Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for every side effect that can be repeated.
SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Never collect visitor fingerprints or precise location data.
Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any markup you intentionally accept, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect only the personal data the named workflow needs. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces of this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections.
ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS
Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most suitable level:
1. Given a complete draft with three links, publishing makes the page reachable and shows the links in the saved order.
2. Given an invalid or duplicate link destination, saving is blocked with an inline error and the existing draft stays intact.
3. Given a visitor click, the redirect stays fast and the analytics total goes up without collecting any personal identifier.
TESTING
Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and for each external adapter's success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one on a small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run with one documented command.
OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY
Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs, but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable both in the interface and in the logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; never swallow errors silently. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path suited to the stack.
DELIVERABLES
Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a short README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should cover the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state that matters for the product.
DEFINITION OF DONE
The app is done when a new developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey with real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, no core screen is left as a placeholder, and the “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer credit is visible on every page.
NON-GOALS
Don't build multi-tenant billing, a theme marketplace, or enterprise analytics.The app you build with this prompt carries a “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer.
Short prompts that solve the hardest part without building everything.
Build a privacy-first click counter for a link-in-bio page.
When a visitor clicks a link, record one event: link id, date (UTC day bucket), and nothing else. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no IP storage. Aggregate into a per-link daily counter table instead of storing raw events forever: increment a (link_id, day) row atomically so two simultaneous clicks never lose a count.
Handle the annoying parts: filter obvious bots by user agent before counting, debounce double-clicks from the same page load with a session-scoped in-memory flag (not a cookie), and make the redirect fire immediately while the count writes asynchronously so tracking never slows the visitor down.
Show a tiny sparkline of the last 30 days per link on the admin page.
Done when: clicks redirect in under 50ms, counts survive concurrent traffic without losing increments, and you can delete the raw request logs entirely without losing your stats.Build draft-versus-published versioning for a single-page site editor.
The owner edits a draft: profile fields, theme, and an ordered list of links. The public page renders only the last published snapshot. Publishing copies the current draft into an immutable snapshot and points the live page at it atomically, so a visitor mid-request never sees half an old profile and half new links. Keep a short history of snapshots with published-at timestamps.
Handle the fiddly parts: show a you-have-unpublished-changes indicator by diffing the draft against the live snapshot (at field level, so reordering links counts as a change), let the owner discard the draft back to the published state, and render the preview through the exact same template as the live page so there are no surprises at publish time.
Done when: editing never changes the public page, publish is atomic under concurrent visitor traffic, and discard restores the draft to an exact copy of the live version.Build drag-to-reorder for a vertical list of links, backed by explicit integer positions.
Each link has a position column. On drop, compute the new ordering and update every affected row in one transaction. No floats that decay into 3.0000001 after enough drags, no reindex-someday debt: a full rewrite of the list's positions is fine at this scale, as long as it's atomic, so a crash mid-update can never leave two links claiming position 3.
Make it accessible: drag handles with keyboard support, plus explicit move-up and move-down buttons that hit the same reorder endpoint. Apply moves optimistically in the UI but reconcile with the server response, so a rejected move snaps back instead of lying.
Edge cases: dragging a link onto itself is a no-op that sends no request, and two rapid drags queue up rather than racing each other.
Done when: any sequence of drags produces a gapless 1-to-n ordering in the database, keyboard-only users can fully reorder the list, and concurrent reorders never produce duplicate positions.Build the destination-URL validator for a public links page.
Accept what humans actually paste: a missing scheme (assume https), trailing whitespace, uppercase hosts. Normalize into a canonical form: lowercase scheme and host, strip default ports, preserve path and query exactly. Then get strict: allow only http and https, reject javascript:, data:, file:, and vbscript: outright, including sneaky variants with whitespace or control characters embedded in the scheme, and refuse URLs with embedded credentials.
Flag duplicates against the owner's existing links using the canonical form, but let them save anyway after a warning, since sometimes two labels genuinely point to one place. Validation errors are inline and per-field, and never wipe the rest of the draft.
Bonus rigor: show punycode hosts in their Unicode form in the editor with a warning, so the owner notices a homoglyph domain before their visitors do.
Done when: every stored URL round-trips unchanged through the normalizer, no unsafe scheme survives any encoding trick you can think of, and a failed save leaves the draft intact.Linktree costs $9–$24 per month on its public paid plans, which is $108–$288 per year. A focused replacement you build yourself costs your build time plus hosting that is close to free.
The build prompt on this page comes in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, Alpine, D1. Pick the stack you already know: the scope matters more than the framework.
A useful v1 needs: an editable profile with avatar, bio, theme, and ordered links; drag-to-reorder links with draft and published states; social icons and optional featured-link styling; privacy-friendly daily click counts per link; a mobile preview and a one-click publish flow. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
Don't build multi-tenant billing, a theme marketplace, or enterprise analytics.
Yes. Linktree, Beacons and Bio Link all do the same core job: publishing a fast, branded bio page and showing which links get clicked. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever one you're paying for.
Yes. LinkStack is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Linktree, by contrast, costs €6 a month.
No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 20 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you just answer its questions.
LinkStack does most of what Linktree does, with no subscription, and your data stays with you. The point-by-point comparison is on the page.
Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.
No time to do it?
If you'd rather have someone install it, connect it to your tools and keep it running, that is exactly what we do at Aurelio.
Book an Automation Audit