StackScope Crawls 40K Indie Launches to Map Real Stack Choices

40,000 indie product launches crawled, and the data is finally public — StackScope just dropped a catalogue that tells you what people actually ship with, not what the web as a whole runs.

Jonathan, the solo builder behind it, started with a simple frustration: existing stack-detection sites look at the whole internet. He wanted to see what the indie launch scene picks right now, at the exact moment someone puts something public. So he built a crawler that watches Product Hunt, Show HN, and PeerPush, then visits each live site and sniffs out hosting, frameworks, analytics, DNS, security headers, legal pages, and even AI-builder signals.

What 40,000 Indie Launches Actually Run

StackScope’s fingerprint catalogue is first-party — Jonathan wrote it himself, not copied from Wappalyzer or similar databases. That matters because third-party catalogues often miss modern stacks. The crawler uses Playwright for rendered pages, so JavaScript-heavy frameworks (think SPA or server-rendered React) don’t slip through. Results are live on stackscope.dev, and you can explore by category.

I wish I had this data six months ago when choosing a stack for my side project. Knowing that, say, 15% of recent launches use Tailwind or that Vercel dominates hosting among Show HN posts would have saved me a week of decisions.

How StackScope Works (and Doesn’t)

Under the hood it’s .NET, Playwright for rendering, and the custom fingerprint catalogue. robots.txt is honored, and the bot identifies itself — no stealth scraping. Frustratingly, Jonathan is still waiting for verified bot status from Cloudflare, which currently knocks out about 10% of all sites. That’s a real gap: if Cloudflare blocks your indie launch, StackScope can’t report on it. He acknowledges false positives are possible and explicitly asks for feedback on methodology.

A private readiness check is also live: paste any URL, get the same style of report back. No account, no email. Find a missing security header? Fix it, recrawl, see the change. That’s the kind of immediate feedback loop that makes a tool sticky for founders who care about launch hygiene.

The Cloudflare Tax and Indie Stack Visibility

The Cloudflare block is a concrete pain point. 10% of indie launches might have chosen hosting or CDN that sits behind Cloudflare’s DDoS protection, and we simply don’t see their stack. That’s a blind spot worth knowing about — it skews the data toward sites that are easier to crawl. Jonathan acknowledges this transparently, which is more than most crawlers do.

This kind of launch-specific stack data could start conversations about what’s actually trendy vs. what’s overrepresented in blog posts. I’d love to see a time-series chart of framework shifts over the next six months of crawls. StackScope is open to feedback, and the crawler is already running — watch the catalogue evolve as the next 40,000 launches roll in.

Source: Show HN: StackScope - I crawled over 40k indie launches to see what they ship
Domain: stackscope.dev