Crouching WordPress, Hidden Vercel: The State of Indie Launches, May 2026 | StackScope.dev
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17,652 indie launches analysed in May 2026. Vercel hosts a third of them. This month we look at what the other two-thirds are running.
Strip Vercel out of the May data and the indie web underneath looks nothing like the headline picture.
Last month we described a "modern indie recipe": Tailwind, React, Next.js, Vercel, Cloudflare, shadcn/ui, Google Fonts, Resend, Google Analytics. That recipe sits on top of a launch market where Vercel hosts about a third of every site.
Tailwind adoption drops from 54% to 46%. React drops from 36% to 20%. WordPress and jQuery, invisible in the headline ranking, surface as a real slice of the non-Vercel web. And Google Analytics, counterintuitively, gains share.
The modern-indie-recipe framing from April was mostly a description of what people deploy to Vercel.
Five things stood out
Strip Vercel out and the stack changes shape. Tailwind 54% → 46%, React 36% → 20%, WordPress 6% → 8%, jQuery 1.8% → 2.5%.
The modern analytics tools cluster on Vercel. Outside Vercel, Google Analytics is more common than in the Vercel-only slice: 43.3% of non-Vercel launches run GA, versus roughly a third of Vercel-hosted launches. PostHog and Plausible are concentrated on the Next.js-and-Vercel slice.
Cloudflare Email Sending kept climbing in May. From 38 launches in April to 77 in May. Still a small base, but the bet we flagged in April is starting to pay off.
Tuesday's dominance looks self-fulfilling. On platforms where founders pick the day, Tuesday peaks. On PeerPush, where most founders take a scheduled queue slot rather than choosing a day, the peak vanishes and Wednesday leads instead.
29 founders claimed their own launch and recrawled across April and May. 19 shipped at least one fix: llms.txt, a security header, a privacy policy, the easily-forgotten stuff.
A quick word on methodology
The scored launches come from Product Hunt (84.5%), PeerPush (9.1%), and Hacker News Show HN (6.4%). Every launch in this set was crawled during May 2026. Same baseline crawl as last month: static HTML, rendered DOM via Playwright, DNS and RDAP, legal-page discovery. Tech detection runs against 4,407 fingerprints. Full methodology at /methodology.
Two things changed since the April edition. First, two detection bugs in the April pipeline were fixed before May ran: a wildcard-DKIM bug that had inflated every ESP's count (patched 2026-05-08), and a DNS resolver that had been dropping about 15% of lookups (replaced 2026-05-21) and undercounting every DNS-derived signal. May runs on the fixed pipeline from day one, so its numbers are comparable to the corrected April figures, not the originally-published ones. There's more on both fixes near the end. Second, we now have two months of comparable data, so this issue introduces a delta table further down.
The cohort
Source<br>Launches<br>Share
Product Hunt<br>14,913<br>84.5%
PeerPush<br>1,600<br>9.1%
Hacker News (Show HN)<br>1,132<br>6.4%
Manual / other
Total scored<br>17,652<br>100%
Product Hunt stayed the dominant source at 84.5% of scored launches, up slightly from April's 82.1%. PeerPush slipped from 11.8% to 9.1%, and Show HN held around 6%. Product Hunt surfaces far more launches we can crawl than the other two boards combined, and that shape looks stable across both months.
The non-Vercel cut
A reader of the April edition asked on Reddit a question that turned out to matter more than it first looked: what do the stats look like if Vercel wasn't in the game?
We ran the cut against the 11,996 May launches that aren't hosted on Vercel. Reorder the chart and you'd expect the same technologies in a new sequence. That's not what happens; the composition changes. WordPress, which doesn't crack the top 15 in either view, sits just underneath at 8% of the non-Vercel cohort, up from 6% across the full one. The post's title is what it is for a reason.
The stack, with Vercel removed
Technology<br>Full cohort<br>Non-Vercel cohort
Tailwind CSS<br>54%<br>46%<br>-8pp
React<br>36%<br>20%<br>-16pp
Next.js<br>34%<br>18%<br>-16pp
Vite<br>24%<br>27%<br>+3pp
WordPress<br>6%<br>8%<br>+2pp
jQuery<br>1.8%<br>2.5%<br>+0.7pp
Tailwind's 8-point drop outside Vercel is real but modest; React and Next.js each lose closer to half their share, down about 16 points each. Vite picks up some of the slack: that's the "modern stack but not on Next.js" crowd, usually deployed to Railway, Render, or Netlify.
The bigger surprise is underneath the visible ranking. WordPress holds 8% of the non-Vercel cohort, up from 6% across the full one; jQuery shifts the same way, 1.8% to 2.5%. Neither cracks the top 15 in either view, so neither appears in the chart above. The tell is the table just before it: both rise once Vercel comes out. The slice of indie launches that doesn't deploy to Vercel still contains a real WordPress-and-jQuery population, which the modern-indie-recipe framing from April quietly...