Can I vibe code Excalidraw?
Virtual whiteboard for hand-drawn-style diagrams and sketches.
Excalidraw is open source under a permissive license, so the real question is whether you can self-host or fork it — and the answer is an easy yes. The core editor is free to run, and even a from-scratch hand-drawn-style diagram tool is very achievable (Rough.js gives you the sketchy look for free). The paid Excalidraw+ tier sells collaboration, cloud storage, and team management, which are conveniences, not a moat. For personal use you can have the real thing for zero, which is the whole point of this site.
Build a hand-drawn-style whiteboard for my own use (an Excalidraw-style tool). Use a canvas with a sketchy rendering library like Rough.js to draw rectangles, ellipses, arrows, lines, and freehand strokes, plus editable text, all in that rough hand-drawn aesthetic. Support selecting, moving, resizing, styling (stroke color, fill, thickness), an infinite pannable and zoomable canvas, multi-select, grouping, and undo/redo. Save scenes to local storage and allow export to PNG and SVG plus import/export as JSON. Use a modern web stack, and note that the original Excalidraw is open source — this can either reimplement it or simply be self-hosted for free.
A hand-drawn-style diagramming canvas with shapes, arrows, text, and local save — either self-hosted from the open-source project or built fresh.
- Hosted real-time collaboration on the plus tier
- Cloud storage and cross-device sync of your drawings
- Team libraries and workspace management
- Not much else — the core is genuinely free and open
Excalidraw+ exists for teams that want hosted collaboration and cloud storage without self-hosting — a real convenience, but a thin one. For an individual, the open-source app already does the job for free, so paying is optional rather than necessary.
A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.
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