Survicate

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Build me an in-product survey tool that replaces Survicate: short questions asked inside my own app, at the right moment, without a third-party script watching my users.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, SQLite through better-sqlite3
- One small embeddable script, vanilla, under 10KB gzipped, served from my own domain
- Server-rendered admin, no client framework
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- surveys: id, name, status, kind, created_at, started_at, ended_at
- questions: id, survey_id, position, kind, title, description, required, settings_json
- targeting: id, survey_id, rule_kind, operator, value — page URL, event fired, user attribute, time on page, first seen, device
- displays: id, survey_id, session_hash, shown_at, dismissed_at, completed_at
- answers: id, display_id, question_id, value_text, value_number, value_choice, answered_at
- respondents: id, key_hash, attributes_json, first_seen, last_seen
- Question kinds: nps, csat, rating, single choice, multiple choice, short text, long text, yes/no
- Nothing identifies a person unless the host application chose to send an attribute; the default identity is a salted hash of a session

ASKING AT THE RIGHT MOMENT
- Trigger on: page matching a pattern, a custom event the app fires, N seconds on a page, scroll depth, exit intent on desktop, or an explicit call from the app
- Frequency rules that are actually respected: never show the same survey twice to the same respondent, never show any survey more than once per N days, never during the first session unless told otherwise
- A global off switch, and a preview mode that only the admin sees
- Delay and probability: show to 20% of people who match, so a survey does not exhaust its audience in a day

QUESTION LOGIC
- Branching: an answer sends the respondent to a specific question or ends the survey
- NPS behaves like NPS: 0 to 10, and a follow-up whose wording depends on detractor, passive or promoter
- Every question skippable unless required, and required questions are the ones people abandon on
- A thank-you screen that can carry a link
- Partial answers are kept: somebody who answers two of four has told you something

THE WIDGET
- Three shapes: a small card in a corner, a bar at the top or bottom, and a modal that must be dismissible
- Never block the page, never take focus without being opened, never move the page content
- Keyboard reachable and screen-reader labelled: a survey that traps a keyboard user is a survey that gets your product complained about
- Remembers where it was if the page reloads mid-survey
- Renders from a single JSON payload fetched once per session, so answering does not need a round trip per question
- Respects prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme, and takes a colour and a corner radius from a config so it looks like the host application

READING THE ANSWERS
- Per survey: shown, started, completed, and the completion rate — defined on the page, because everybody computes it differently
- NPS score with the three groups and the trend by week
- Choice questions as counts and percentages; text answers as a list you can read and tag
- Filter every view by any attribute the app sent, by device, by page
- Export to CSV, and a JSON feed per survey
- A daily digest email of new answers, off by default

PRIVACY, WHICH IS THE REASON TO SELF-HOST
- No cookie: the session identity is a salted hash held in memory and in sessionStorage
- No IP stored, no user agent stored beyond a coarse device bucket
- The script talks to your domain and nowhere else, and the admin can say so on a privacy page
- A data request from a respondent can be answered: attributes come from the host app, so deletion is a delete by key

THE INTERFACE
- Build a survey on one page: questions on the left, live preview on the right
- Targeting rules read as sentences, not as a query builder
- Dark and light, one accent

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, BASE_URL, ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH, HASH_SALT
- Migrations on boot, each once
- The payload endpoint answers from memory with an ETag: it is hit by every page view of the host app
- Nightly backup off the machine, restore script included
- Health endpoint

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The widget and the frequency rules are the product. A survey tool that annoys people costs more than it learns. Build the script, the trigger rules and the one-per-N-days memory first, put it on a real page and try to make it annoying — if you can, the rules are not finished.

Give me the repository, the embeddable script, migrations, .env.example, a seed survey, and a README with deploy steps behind Caddy.