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
Codex on the ChatGPT Free plan: we gave it $0 and the same booking app
We handed the free tier of OpenAI's coding agent the exact founder pitch, curveballs and frozen gates that Cursor Pro and Claude Code faced in August. It cleared all twelve, including the concurrency gate both $20 tools failed, in under ten minutes of agent time. The bill was 37 percent of a 30-day meter, and the model behind the door was not the one in the launch posts.
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 6
The frontier now ships twice. The second copy is not for sale.
In one week, all three frontier labs released their best model in two versions: a public one anyone can pay for, and a vetted one with the same weights and fewer refusals that you have to be someone to get. The price did not move. The gate did.
The Primer · Tools & Stacks
How to use Ollama: run AI models on your own machine
Ollama runs open models on your own computer, for free, with one install command and one run command. For a vibe coder the appeal is blunt: inference that costs nothing, never leaves your laptop, and has no rate limit but your hardware. Here is the whole thing, install to editor, plus the plain catch about your RAM and the reason Claude Code will not point at it without help.
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
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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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