[recipes] Vercel + Neon + Telegram alternative architecture

[geoff-price]

Summary

• Alternative Open Brain architecture using Vercel (serverless), Neon (pgvector), and Telegram (mobile capture) instead of Cloudflare + Supabase + Slack
• Uses Vercel AI SDK with OpenAI directly (no OpenRouter)
• MCP server with Streamable HTTP transport (2025-03-26 spec)
• 4 capture channels: MCP clients, Telegram bot, HTTP API, CLI
• Timing-safe auth, rate limiting (30 req/min), 10KB input cap
• 30 unit tests (auth, rate limiting, Zod schemas)
• Tested on a personal instance across ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and Telegram

What it does

Deploys a complete Open Brain on the Vercel + Neon stack. The thoughts table schema and match_thoughts() function are identical to OB1's — data is portable between stacks.

Component	Default (OB1)	This recipe
Runtime	Cloudflare Workers	Vercel Serverless (Next.js App Router)
Database	Supabase (pgvector)	Neon Postgres (pgvector)
AI Provider	OpenAI via OpenRouter	OpenAI direct (Vercel AI SDK)
Mobile capture	Slack	Telegram (grammY)
MCP transport	SSE	Streamable HTTP
Auth	Supabase auth + API keys	Static access key (timing-safe)

Requirements

• Vercel account (free tier)
• Neon account (free tier)
• OpenAI API key
• Telegram account (optional, for mobile capture)

Testing

Tested on a personal deployment (engram) with cross-client verification:

• Captured thoughts from Telegram, ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, and Claude Code
• Searched and listed thoughts across all clients
• Unit tests pass: npm test (30 tests, vitest)

Test plan

• Recipe is in correct recipes/ directory
• README has all required sections (prerequisites, instructions, expected outcome, troubleshooting)
• metadata.json is valid with all required fields
• No credentials or API keys in source
• SQL creates new tables only (no modifications to core tables)
• Changes confined to recipes/vercel-neon-telegram/
• Internal README links resolve correctly

🤖 Generated with Claude Code