Methodology & legal

How these verdicts are made

This is an independent, educational directory. Every verdict is an opinion formed from public information: documentation, pricing pages, changelogs, open-source equivalents and hands-on rebuild attempts.

The two numbers that matter

Vibe code score — how much of the visible product an AI agent can produce from a single well-written prompt. High means the interface is not the business.

Moat score — everything you cannot generate: proprietary data, network effects, carrier and payment contracts, certifications, integration surface and years of edge cases.

Verdict is derived from the gap between them. A high vibe score with a low moat is a YES. A high moat is a NOT REALLY, no matter how simple the UI looks.

Editorial independence

— No product analysed here is monetised through affiliate links. The only affiliate link on the site is the Lovable one in the footer, and Lovable is not a product we score.
— Sponsor slots are labelled, buy placement only, and never change a verdict.
— Vendors can request a correction; corrections are published, verdicts are not sold.
— Analytics are first-party only. No third-party trackers, no ad networks, no session replay.

Legal position

Building a competing product with your own code is lawful competition. Copying source code, brand assets, trademarks or scraping a platform in breach of its terms is not. The prompts here describe common feature sets — they are a starting point for your own implementation, not a way to clone anyone's software. All trademarks belong to their respective owners; this project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any product it analyses.

This site was vibe coded. Here is the prompt.

Practising what it preaches: the whole directory came from one prompt plus iteration. Copy it and build your own directory for a different industry.

Build a directory site called "Can I Vibe Code It?" that answers, for every paid e-commerce SaaS product, how much of it an AI coding agent could realistically rebuild.

Data: one JSON file per product in data/apps/ with slug, name, domain, category, subcategory, description, priceMonthly, pricingModel, an 8-axis score object (vibeCode, moat, technical, operational, integration, dataAdvantage, networkEffects, compliance), mvpBuildTime, fullReplacementTime, verdict (yes|kinda|no), verdictSummary, executiveVerdict, replaceableFeatures[], whatYouLose[], realMoats[], technicalChallenges[], operationalChallenges[], networkEffects[], priorArt[], alternatives[], a one-shot build prompt, buildInstead[] and notes.

Homepage: a hero search that live-filters as you type, emoji category chips, a stock-ticker banner showing collective monthly spend challenged with odometer-rolling digits and a scrolling price tape, and "The Death List" — a sortable table of every product with favicon, category, price, verdict badge, vibe/moat scores and replacement votes.

Product pages at /:slug: big verdict, terminal-style score meters, the one-shot build prompt in a code block with per-agent copy buttons, what you can replace, an honest "what you lose" list, the real moats, "build this instead" niches, open-source prior art links, related products, an "I replaced this" vote button that is IP-hashed and rate limited with no auth, a share button and a 4-question FAQ.

Also ship category pages, ranking pages, a head-to-head comparison page, a submission form and an about page. Server-render everything, use question-format titles, canonical URLs, JSON-LD (Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList), sitemap.xml, robots.txt and per-page OG images. Add newsletter capture with a honeypot and dedupe, plus first-party analytics only.

Aesthetic: developer tooling. JetBrains Mono and Space Grotesk, CRT-black dark mode by default with a paper light mode, phosphor green as the only loud colour. Micro-animations everywhere — odometer rolls, hover lifts, press scales, copy confirmations — all respecting prefers-reduced-motion. MIT licence, public repo, no third-party tracking.

Contribute

The data is MIT licensed and lives as one JSON file per product. Send a pull request, or submit a product for the research queue.

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