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

A maker dropped StackScope, a project that scanned more than 40,000 indie product launches to see what small startups are actually built with, and the biggest gasp from the crowd was simple: wow, a huge chunk of them are living on Vercel. The report says about a third of indie launches use it, and when you remove those sites from the count, the whole picture changes. Suddenly some of the trendiest tools look a lot less dominant. For data nerds, that’s juicy. For the comments section, it was basically blood in the water.

The replies quickly split into classic internet factions. One camp was impressed and instantly wanted more: faster crawling, wider data, more clues about what each product actually does, and even whether odd little files like "robots.txt" show up in the wild. Another camp got hung up on the irony that a site about analyzing web launches had its own layout breaking for at least one user, who came in with a mini bug report and receipts. That gave the whole thread a deliciously chaotic energy.

Then came the emotional damage: one commenter flat-out mourned that Next.js has become the default for so many startups, turning a market snapshot into a tiny culture-war moment. Another seemed genuinely shocked that Cloudflare Pages wasn’t closer in the hosting race. So yes, the report is about what indie makers ship, but the real show is the reaction: surprise, nitpicking, tool tribalism, and just enough website breakage to make the whole thing feel very, very internet.