Vibe coding · What you make · How you sell it
Independent publication and research for vibe coders.
A publication for the solo builder doing it all with AI: vibe coding the product, finding the users, pricing the work. Here you will learn how to market, what the studies say, and what tools to use, and read about other founders who have done it all.
Free to read, no account. One email only when we have tested something worth your time.
The Studio · verified
Studio 03 · Tom Huang, Open Design: "Stars are not revenue wearing a trench coat"
Eleven days after Anthropic shipped Claude Design, a Shanghai team shipped the open-source alternative. It has since crossed a million installs on 77,000 stars, and the first build cost about $200. Tom Huang on the file-first method that let agents write all the code, why giving the product away was the plan, and the part no agent can do for you.
Built by Tom Huang · Open Design
The Proof · AI tool
Rank Prompt on the free plan: it scored our AI visibility at zero, and by hand we found citations on two of eight questions
Before we opened an account we asked Perplexity and Google AI Mode eight questions our readers ask, and wrote down every source they cited. Then we let Rank Prompt run its free report on the same site. It said zero percent, on nine questions it wrote itself. Both results are correct, and the gap between them is the whole product: an AI visibility tool measures the questions it chooses, and the free plan chooses questions a small site cannot win.
How to read the marks
A Studio build we checked: it is live and its receipts hold up. Hands-on when we can run it ourselves, independently confirmed when it is a B2B build we cannot.
A Proof verdict on a tool we used ourselves: signed up, ran real tasks, and logged what it costs.
The Ledger · Selling
App Store or web checkout: the math at 15%
A US iPhone app can send buyers to its own checkout and pay Apple nothing on the sale. For a developer in Apple's Small Business Program that is worth 84 cents on a $9.99 plan, and the published results at that rate came out flat or behind. Google now charges 10% on US link-out subscriptions. Where the web route still pays, and why AI apps get more room.
The Study · Explainer
AI agents buy through your own checkout, and disputes still land on you
In March OpenAI pulled back its in-chat checkout and started sending ChatGPT shoppers to merchants' own sites. Google's and Microsoft's checkouts reach small sellers mainly through platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, PayPal and Stripe, sell to US buyers, and several exclude subscriptions. For a seller on their own site, the agents that can buy today mostly use that site's checkout, and no card network has moved disputes off the seller.
The Signal · Issue 7
Your users can pay your AI bill with ChatGPT. OpenAI keeps the meter.
At DevDay, OpenAI made the ChatGPT subscription an official way to pay for AI inside other apps. For a small AI product that can take the biggest cost off the books. It also puts the product's capacity on an allowance OpenAI sets, and the same day OpenAI lowered what the $200 plan includes.
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Why us
We do the homework.
Anyone can repost a cool demo. We use the thing, tell you what's real vs. smoke, do the cost and pricing math, and link you straight to the maker. The skepticism is on the work, never the people.
See the price index: 101 tools, verified →Link back · buttons and the ring
The old way the web found each other.
Grab an 88 by 31 button for your site, or join the vibe coders ring: a small loop of sites built with AI, linked footer to footer so people can wander the circle. You link us, we link you.
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