When FIFA announced the World Cup 2026 draw, I had an idea. What if I built a score prediction game — a proper one, with real-time leaderboards, group competitions, email notifications, and a slick mobile-friendly UI — and launched it in time for the tournament?
I've been building on Alpha Anywhere low-code app development software for years. I know the platform well. But this project pushed me into corners of Alpha Anywhere and Alpha Cloud I'd never explored before, and what I found genuinely surprised me.
Here's what I built, what surprised me, and why I'd do it all again on Alpha.
The App: Goal Count
Goal Count is a FIFA World Cup 2026 score prediction platform. Users register, predict the score of every group stage and knockout fixture, earn points, and compete on both an overall leaderboard and private group leaderboards.
Under the hood it's a single Alpha Anywhere UX component wrapping every panel, freeform, and controlbar in the application. The backend is SQL Server hosted on AWS RDS, with SparkPost EU handling all transactional email.
In six weeks of evenings and weekends, working solo, I went from zero to a soft-launched platform with 20+ active users and rising — all predictions locked, scored, and live before the first whistle.
"I Never Knew You Could Do That" with Alpha Anywhere
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A Full Transactional Email Pipeline — With Delivery Tracking
I knew Alpha Anywhere could send email via SMTP. What I didn't expect was how cleanly I could build a complete delivery tracking pipeline on top of it.
Every email in Goal Count — verification, password reset, group invites, bulk announcements — goes through a dedicated Xbasic function that logs each send to an email log table with status SENT. SparkPost EU then fires webhook events back to a dedicated receiver page as emails are delivered, bounced, or flagged as spam. The webhook updates the log to DELIVERED, BOUNCED, or SPAM — all in real time.
The result: a full audit trail of every email ever sent by the platform, with per-recipient delivery status, bounce reasons, and timestamps. Built entirely in Xbasic and Alpha Anywhere, no third-party middleware.
I never knew Alpha Anywhere could be the backbone of a production-grade email operations pipeline.
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Bulk Email With Per-Recipient Personalisation
With the tournament starting, I needed to send a "Welcome — first game today, good luck!" message to all active users. I built an admin bulk email tool directly inside the app — a compose UI with subject, freeform body, recipient selector (all users or hand-picked individuals), and a test mode that redirects every send to the admin's own address with a banner showing the intended recipient.
Under the hood it loops through recipients one at a time in Xbasic — one email log row per user, one SparkPost send per user. No BCC, no exposure of addresses, full webhook tracking per recipient.
The whole thing — UI, Xbasic logic, email template — was built and deployed in an afternoon.
I never knew building a personalised bulk email tool inside an Alpha Anywhere app could be that straightforward.
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Real-Time Localised Kickoff Times Across Time Zones
The World Cup spans multiple continents and time zones. Kickoff times are stored in UTC in SQL Server. Users are based everywhere from London to Sydney.
The solution: Xbasic formats kickoff times as ISO 8601 UTC strings and emits them as data attributes on HTML elements. A dedicated JavaScript function scans the page for those attributes and converts each one to the user's local time using the browser's native internationalisation API. No server-side timezone logic, no user preference to configure, no wrong times.
Every fixture — on the home dashboard, the predictions panel, the admin fixtures screen — shows the correct local time automatically, for every user, everywhere.
I never knew combining Alpha's server-side rendering with browser-native internationalisation APIs could produce something this clean.
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A Group Invite System That Handles Both New and Existing Users
Group invites were one of the trickiest features to design. The logic: if the invited email already has an account, add them to the group immediately and notify them. If not, send them a tokenised registration link that auto-enrolls them into the group on signup.
Alpha Anywhere handled both paths cleanly. Xbasic checks for an existing user, branches accordingly, generates a secure token, and sends the appropriate email — all in a single ajax callback. The invite list shows real-time delivery status (Sent, Delivered, Bounced) pulled from the email log, with a Resend button for any non-accepted invite.
I never knew I could build a complete invite-and-onboarding flow this elegantly in Xbasic.
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A Full Admin UX Embedded Inside the Main App
Rather than a separate admin application, Goal Count's admin panel lives inside the main UX as a hidden panel card — activated only for users with the Admin role. It covers fixtures and results (with auto-scoring via a stored procedure), season management, user administration (with search, pagination, status management, and manual approval), group management, email log review, and the bulk email tool.
Everything renders dynamically into a single content area, driven by ajax callbacks and injected HTML. The admin experience feels native to the app because it is — same styling, same component, same session context.
I never knew a full-featured admin suite could feel this seamless when built inside the main Alpha Anywhere component rather than as a separate application.
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Alpha Cloud Made Deployment a Non-Event
Publishing to dev, testing, then publishing to production — on Alpha Cloud this is a matter of minutes. Separate named connection strings meant the same codebase ran against the correct database in each environment automatically, with a simple hostname check for environment detection.
The Web App Repository handled secrets — email credentials, webhook tokens — without a single hardcoded credential anywhere in the codebase.
I never knew deploying a production application could be this friction-free.
The Secret Weapon: CAI
I wouldn't be honest if I didn't mention the other major factor in delivering this project at pace: CAI — Claude AI.
Throughout the build I used CAI as a development partner. Not to write the whole application for me, but to think through architecture decisions, debug tricky Xbasic behaviour, generate boilerplate for new features, and keep momentum going when I hit walls. It allowed me to stay focused on managing the whole project — the data model, the user experience, the deployment pipeline — rather than getting stuck in the weeds of any single problem.
The result was a pace of delivery I couldn't have matched alone. Features that might have taken a day to research and implement were done in hours. Complex debugging sessions that could have stretched into evenings were resolved in minutes.
With Alpha Anywhere increasingly leveraging AI capabilities within the product itself, that kind of accelerated development is only going to become more accessible to Alpha developers. If this project is anything to go by, the combination of Alpha's rapid application development platform and AI assistance is a genuinely powerful one.
I never knew I could deliver a production-ready application of this complexity, solo, in six weeks — until CAI helped me prove it was possible.
What I'd Tell Another Alpha Anywhere Developer
If you're an experienced Alpha developer who hasn't pushed the platform into full-stack territory — custom webhook receivers, transactional email pipelines, dynamic admin UIs, real-time browser localisation — you might be surprised what's already within reach.
The platform I built Goal Count on isn't a different version of Alpha Anywhere. It's the same tools, used more boldly.
The World Cup is about to start and Goal Count is live. And I built it solo, on evenings and weekends, on a platform I've trusted for years — which turned out to be even more capable than I knew. I invite you to log on and try it yourself. Enjoy the FIFA!
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Goal Count is live at goal-count.com. Built by Glen Schild, GJ Stats Ltd.
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