How vibeheatmap works
Where the projects come from
Public posts from r/SideProject, r/vibecoding, r/SaaS, r/IMadeThis, r/chrome_extensions, r/ShowYourApp, r/ShowYourProduct, r/RoastMyApp, r/showMyProject, collected from Reddit continuously since May 04, 2026. Usernames are never shown; every project links back to its original thread.
What counts as a project
An AI model (Claude Haiku) reads each post's title and text and decides whether it shows something the author built. If it does, it writes a plain one-line description of what the product does, who it is for, a short category, and what form it takes (web app, mobile app, extension and so on). Questions, discussions and service offers are left out. Marketing claims and revenue numbers are ignored.
Each product counts once
Builders often post the same product to several subreddits, or again in later weeks. A product is counted once, in the week it first appears, recognised by the link to it (its own site, app store page, extension page or repository) or, without a link, by the same author posting the same product name. So the heatmap shows what is newly being built, and posting one app many times doesn't make its group look busier.
Where a post links to the product, "Visit" goes straight to it. Those links come from the builders' own posts and aren't checked or endorsed.
How projects are grouped
The descriptions are turned into vectors with an open embedding model and clustered into 200 groups, which Claude named and gathered into 23 themes. The groups are frozen, so a week's numbers can be compared with any other week's. Each new project joins the group it is closest to. Projects that are not close to any group are listed under "Didn't fit any group", which is where new kinds of projects appear first.
Reading the numbers
- Weeks run Monday to Sunday, UTC.
- Share is a group or theme's slice of all projects. It is worked out inside each subreddit and then combined with fixed weights (each subreddit's share of all projects since May 2026). That way, when one subreddit's moderators start holding posts, or a new subreddit appears, the mix doesn't shift and look like a trend. Project counts are shown as they are.
- Heatmap colour compares each theme's share that week with its own average, so a small theme having an unusual week shows up as clearly as a big one.
- Rising and cooling compare a group's share over the last 4 weeks with the 8 weeks before. A group needs at least 40 projects in the last 4 weeks and 20 before to be listed.
- Comments are as collected; posts gathered from archives may show fewer comments than they have now.
Known gaps
- Reddit's spam filter and subreddit moderators remove many posts before anyone sees them; only posts that stayed up are counted.
- r/vibecoding began holding most new posts for moderator approval in late August 2026, so it contributes fewer projects from then on.