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
Google Antigravity at $0: we gave it the same booking app and it ran out of models by half past four
Google closed the free door on the Gemini CLI and pointed individuals at Antigravity. So we walked through that door with the same founder pitch, curveballs and frozen gates the other three agents faced. The free tier serves Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-OSS, and in one afternoon we hit the weekly wall on all three. Nine of ten reached gates passed. The money curveball was never reached.
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 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.
The Primer · Tools & Stacks
How to use OpenCode: the open-source terminal agent
OpenCode is a free, open-source AI coding agent that runs in your terminal and points at almost any model, 75+ providers or a local one on your own machine. It is the model-agnostic, MIT-licensed answer to a terminal agent, and the two things worth knowing first are which OpenCode is the real one and how you connect a model. This is the whole thing, install to first edit, and what it does and does not cost.
The Ledger · Selling
Stripe or a merchant of record: the checkout decision
Stripe wins the sticker comparison, 2.9% against 5%-and-up, and loses the real one, because the sticker is not the product. On Stripe you are the merchant of record, which for a solo product with EU customers means VAT from the first sale, quarterly filings, and add-ons that are priced separately. Here is the fee math six ways, with the tax liability each one does or does not take off your plate.
AI tool price index
What 101 AI tools cost: entry price, the plan that does real work, verified monthly.
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AI margin calculator
What you actually keep after the model bill, fees, churn, and tax.
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The Content API
Everything here as raw JSON: free, no auth, built for your agents and scripts.
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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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