Show HN: StackScope – I crawled over 40k indie launches to see what they ship

Posted by datafreak_ 4 days ago

Hey all, I built StackScope, a crawler/catalogue that looks at new product launches and shows what they were built with.

It watches launches from Product Hunt, Show HN, and PeerPush, then crawls the public site behind each one. The goal is to show what people actually launched with: hosting, frameworks, analytics, DNS, security headers, legal pages, AI-builder signals, and other public clues.

I started building it because most stack-detection sites look at the web as a whole. I was more interested in the current indie launch scene: what people are choosing right now, at the point they first put something in public.

A few implementation details: it runs on .NET, uses Playwright for rendered pages, and has a first-party fingerprint catalogue rather than one copied from Wappalyzer/etc. robots.txt is honoured, and the bot identifies itself.

Frustratingly, I am still waiting for verified bot status from Cloudflare and currently that knocks out about 10% of all sites.

There is also a private readiness check: paste a URL, get the same style of report, fix things, and recrawl. No account or email needed.

I'd be interested in feedback on the usefulness of this, the methodology, and any obvious false positives.

Jonathan.

Comments

Comment by pixel_popping 4 days ago

Images/layout is broken - tried both chromium/ff. GET https://stackscope.dev/css/fonts.css?v=LZFlL4O9GYH_vtKkLpJwV... NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT

GET https://stackscope.dev/css/stackscope.css?v=qkmEKPTNqImS7aeD... NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT

GET https://stackscope.dev/css/utilities.css?v=l7--cPr2cfIn6iDRB... NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT

GET https://stackscope.dev/css/page-extras.css?v=m-VKj9bQg7fMpFK... NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT

GET https://stackscope.dev/js/site.js?v=SxUp8zU6gnAArRwBXr22wIBS... NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT

Comment by datafreak_ 4 days ago

What's your response header content? Reads like it's being cf-mitigated.

Edit: loosened a cf rule, should be good now.

Comment by addedlovely 4 days ago

Nice one.

I've been doing the same bit wider scope, for the whole Crux list, pruned to apex domains, and looking for CMS signals - how's your throughput?

I'm not doing any headless browser stuff, or many requests, so hyper optimised for speed.

I do grab robots.txt - didn't really see much in llms.txt or humans.txt in the wild, does yours?

Comment by addedlovely 4 days ago

Ohh Cloudflare verified bot status, interesting I'll check that out.

I'm seeing about 6.6% block rate, but that does climb over time.

Comment by datafreak_ 4 days ago

[dead]

Comment by schamack 3 days ago

That looks very impressive! And really insightful as well. And to my surprise, I even found my startup on the landing page :D (possibly due to fresh HN post here as well).

I will have a thorough look on the insights later, as there might either be some small false positives, or my projects still needs some grunt work :).

So from my perspective, being part of the check, I find it extremely useful.

Comment by datafreak_ 3 days ago

Let me know if anything is detected wrong!

Comment by schamack 1 day ago

Alright, so I went through all the potential issues and already implemented the changes where applicable :).

My app is Tekyous (didn't go through this option to claim the launch): https://stackscope.dev/launch/xsa4cjwn/tekyous

And turns out that actually there were almost no false-positives here at all. Some of the flagged things were rather minor, like missing files that are not really necessary in my case, or too long meta descriptions, but technically all is flagged correctly even if severity is low.

But on the other hand, it has also correctly flagged my tracking settings or overly strict rules for AI crawlers, so this were genuinely useful for me to find out now.

And the only real false-positive is actually a recognised AI builder signature for Bolt.new - not sure where that one comes from, as Bolt.new was not used here. I've only used Claude Code, mostly with Anthropic + GLM by Z.AI models.

Hope that feedback helps you, as I have defnitely found it helpful on my end. Thanks!

Comment by Gabriel_Valente 4 days ago

Nice one, looks interesting. I didn't knew that Vercel was so far ahead on hosting. People don't usually use Cloudflare Pages for hosting? Or it doesn't enter in that metric? https://stackscope.dev/trends/2026/06

Overall this looks solid

Comment by datafreak_ 4 days ago

Cloudflare Pages get hidden behind the CF CDN, so are included in the CDN figure.

Comment by Gabriel_Valente 4 days ago

right, makes sense

Comment by jrhizor 4 days ago

This was interesting to look at for my own launch https://stackscope.dev/launch/xisjc21x/elmo

I'm a little surprised you can't see the analysis for StackScope itself!

Also, it'd be interesting to see the trend of vibe score over time.

Comment by datafreak_ 4 days ago

I'm trying but it's getting blocked by Cloudflare and ending up getting broken, ha!

I will include a vibe score trend in the next blog post.

Comment by idid 4 days ago

One extension, beyond stack: market category/domain/application - or any combo that tells me what the product does.

Fab project otherwise!

Comment by datafreak_ 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by 8organicbits 4 days ago

Cool tool, I'm also surprised by how different the startup stacks are from the general Internet.

For HSTS, don't forget to check the preload list. Domains under .dev are all preloaded, for example, so they don't need to set the header for HSTS to apply.

Comment by vdev123 21 hours ago

This is interesting.

Comment by thetwopct 4 days ago

Interesting but Laravel usage seems so low. As Laravel uses React or Vue etc I feel like a site could be easily classified as React when it’s Laravel running the show.

Comment by datafreak_ 3 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by cpursley 4 days ago

Makes me sad how Nextjs has become the default for so many startups…

Comment by sandeepkd 4 days ago

Unfortunately the chances are that it would become cyclic with the increasing use of LLMs to generate code