What 649 public apps look like from the outside
We ran a passive outside-in check over apps that makers posted in public, to see how often a live app has quietly stopped working. The short answer: rarely in the first two months, often after six.
31 of 86
Supabase-backed apps whose page loads while their Supabase address no longer resolves
4% → 33%
AI-built apps that are down: posted in the last 2 months vs more than 6 months ago
0 of 162
apps on their own domain using a Stripe test key. We expected this to be common. It was not.
How it changes with age
| Posted | Supabase address gone | AI-built apps down | Other apps down |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last 60 days | 0 of 6 | 2 of 52 (4%) | 2 of 55 (4%) |
| 2 to 6 months | 4 of 11 | 5 of 40 (13%) | 9 of 109 (8%) |
| More than 6 months | 27 of 69 (39%) | 70 of 211 (33%) | 39 of 182 (21%) |
In every one of the 31 apps whose Supabase address is gone, the landing page still loads normally. From the outside they look fine until someone tries to sign in or save something.
How we checked
649 public apps: 585 from Show HN posts between January 2025 and October 2026, and 64 from two directories where makers list their own vibe-coded apps.
303 of them carry evidence of being AI-built: a builder's domain (Lovable, Replit, Base44, v0, Bolt) or the maker saying so. The other 346 are plain Vercel or Netlify links, kept as a comparison group.
Each app got the free checker's passive check in a key-less study mode: load the public page and its scripts, recognise the host's own error and takedown pages, and ask the Supabase project the code points at whether it answers, without sending any key. (The free checker also uses the app's own public key to read the project's sign-in settings. The study did not.)
We never logged in, never used anyone's keys and never read data. Results are published only as totals, and no app is named.
What this does and does not show
- — Many of these apps are old demos their makers moved on from. A dead demo is not a mistake. The point is that a dead app can look alive, and nobody notices unless someone checks.
- — Age means the date of the Show HN post or directory entry, not the launch date.
- — The AI-built group's oldest row includes 94 apps over a year old (45% down); the other group has none that old. At 6 to 12 months the rates are 24% and 21%.
- — A Supabase address that no longer resolves means the project is paused or deleted: Supabase's documentation says both stop resolving. The 31 were re-checked through two public DNS resolvers, and healthy apps resolved as expected.
- — Supabase's storage address for the same project still answers, and it tells the two apart. On 26 and 27 October 2026, 27 of the 31 answered "Project paused" and 4 answered "Project removed". A live project and a made-up one, checked the same way, answered differently. Supabase does not document this answer, so treat it as a measurement, not a guarantee. Its documentation says an owner can restore a paused project for up to a year after the pause.
- — The comparison group has the same problem: 13 of 30 of its Supabase-backed apps against 18 of 56 AI-built ones. This is about apps nobody watches, not about AI-written code.
- — 'Down' means any of: an error page, the host's own not-found, paused or takedown page, no answer, or a backend address that no longer resolves.
- — 2 apps showed a live AI-provider key in their public code. 1 more flag was a sample key printed on a security tool's own page, which we count as a false alarm: 1 in 649.
- — This is a sample of apps people chose to show in public, not of every app online.
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