New startup ideas · AI for people who run the AI themselves · What vibe coders need after the demo
startup concept
Stillup
Uptime and error monitoring that answers in fix prompts, not stack traces
Stillup watches a vibe-coded app in production: uptime, crashes, failed API calls, broken flows.
- Software subscription
- Consumer
- YC Fall 2026 RFS 'Self-Maintaining APIs'
7
similar startups, last 2 years (14 all-time)
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$150 · 4 weeks · 25 prospects
Prove burned vibe-coding app owners will pay $19/mo for plain-English monitoring and fix prompts they actually trust, for $150 in 4 weeks.
Riskiest assumption · A non-technical app owner who lost users to silent downtime will pay $19 a month for alerts plus auto-drafted fix prompts, and will trust those prompts enough to keep paying rather than fear one wrong fix.
1Focus group: who and where
A non-technical solo owner of a bolt.new or Lovable app that has been in production about six months with real users, whose app went down over a weekend and lost users before they noticed, and who cannot read a stack trace.
where to find 25 · The bolt.new Discord and the r/lovable subreddit (community); recent bolt and Lovable launches on Product Hunt and their maker comments about outages (a directory of shipped apps); Indie Hackers 'Show IH' posts and the #buildinpublic threads on X where owners vent about apps going down (a channel).
2Sell first, build later
Around-the-clock monitoring for your production app: uptime, crashes and failed API calls, each explained in plain English with a drafted fix prompt for Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code. Live health page and first-cohort onboarding within 30 days.
the ask · $19 per month per app, or $12 per month locked for a year with a $29 founding pre-order.
a real yes · A real yes is a $29 founding deposit on a card. A test alert that impressed them, an added monitoring snippet with no payment, or 'send me the beta' do not count.
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Concierge monitor and fix prompt
$40 · 21 days
Recruit 15 burned owners, add a free uptime and error monitor to each app behind the scenes, and when something breaks the founder writes a plain-English explanation plus a drafted fix prompt for Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code and sends it. Track whether the prompt actually repairs the app and whether the owner pre-pays the $29 founding price after a real alert.
keep going if · 6 of 15 owners pre-pay after a real alert, and 70% or more of drafted fix prompts repair the app on first paste.
2. Ask the ones who went dark
$0 · 10 days
Post and DM in the bolt.new Discord, r/lovable and Indie Hackers asking owners whether their app went down without them knowing, offering to set up free monitoring this week. One founder runs it by hand.
keep going if · 12 of 40 outreach messages turn into a monitoring setup or a booked call.
3. Priced landing smoke test
$110 · 14 days
Publish a one-page site with a live demo health page and a test alert, and a 'Claim founding spot' button that takes a card for the $29 founding price. Drive roughly 300 visits from Indie Hackers and X posts.
keep going if · 15 of 300 visitors start founding checkout.
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$29
per prospect, refundable
how · A refundable founding pre-order taken by card through a checkout on the landing page. The buyer is a self-serve consumer at $19 a month with no sales call, so a small card-taking pre-order is the cleanest test of intent. set up: Stripe Checkout ↗
what it reserves · First-cohort onboarding and the $12 per month founding price locked for 12 months instead of $19.
refund · Fully refundable within 30 days, no questions asked.
target · 8 founding deposits from 25 owners within 30 days.
Go: build it if
8 or more of 25 owners convert to a $29 founding deposit within 30 days, and 70% or more of drafted fix prompts repair the app on first paste.
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 3 of 25 convert, or drafted fix prompts fail on more than 40% of real incidents.
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
Your app went down over a weekend and you lost users before you even knew. Stillup watches your bolt or Lovable app around the clock, and when something breaks it explains the failure in plain English and drafts the exact fix prompt for Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code so you can repair it yourself. I will set up monitoring on your app free this week. Can we grab 20 minutes so I can show you the live health page and a test alert?
landing page
Know your app is down before your users do $29 locks founding access: monitoring plus plain-English fix prompts at $12/mo for a year, not $19. Paste your app URL and claim your founding spot.
deposit terms
Your $29 reserves founding access: uptime and error monitoring with drafted fix prompts, locked at $12 a month for 12 months, plus first-cohort onboarding. Fully refundable within 30 days, no questions. We onboard the first cohort within 30 days.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.
61
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 37.8 x 1.61
Active
competition: more crowded than 69% of ideas · headwind x0.65
+2.8
government priorities, secondary (8 matching grants)
Trend
36
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)59
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
- Sector direction (live batch)50
Demand
65
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
100x potential
65
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Neighbours still alive65
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were uptime, error, monitoring, answers, fix, prompts, not, stack.
The concept in full
- What
- Stillup watches a vibe-coded app in production: uptime, crashes, failed API calls, broken flows. When something breaks it explains the failure in plain English and drafts the corrective prompt for Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code, so the non-developer owner can repair their own app. First hour: paste the app URL, add one monitoring snippet the tool generates, and see a live health page with a test alert.
- Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
- YC's current Fall 2026 RFS lists 'Self-Maintaining APIs' and 'A Cloud for Small Software'; Lovable at 'about $500 million by June 2026' ARR with '80% non-technical builders'; the Anthropic Economic Index (November 2025 data, reported January 2026) shows 52% augmentation on Claude.ai, people who iterate with the model rather than delegate to it.
- What it rides
- YC Fall 2026 RFS 'Self-Maintaining APIs': the monitoring layer is where self-maintenance starts, and Stillup turns every alert into the maintenance action a non-developer can actually take.
- Why now
- Apps built in the 2025 vibe-coding wave, the term Collins named Word of the Year on November 6, 2025, are now hitting month six in production, and their owners face Sentry-class tools written for engineers; YC put 'Self-Maintaining APIs' in its Fall 2026 RFS because this gap is visible now.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- bitrig and Lovable builders whose app went down over a weekend and who lost users before noticing; $19 a month for one app, priced against the $100 to $200 a month these builders already pay for Claude Max or Lovable tiers.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- StarSling (yc X25) does self-driving CI for GitHub Actions, aimed at developers pre-deploy; Confident AI (yc W25) evaluates LLM output quality, not app uptime. Stillup covers the post-deploy hours neither touches, for a buyer who cannot read a stack trace.
- Main risk
- Alert fatigue plus one wrong auto-drafted fix prompt that breaks the app destroys trust with a buyer who cannot verify the diff.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the concept's terms (uptime, error, monitoring, answers, fix, prompts, not, stack).
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The open source, fullstack monitoring platform: stop guessing why…
AI-based full stack observability platform
Public money in this direction
US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
NIH / NIMH · STTR phase I · $395K
National Science Foundation · CER-ComputingEducationResearch · $791K
National Science Foundation · Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace · $315K
National Science Foundation · Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace · $350K
National Science Foundation · Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace · $174K
National Science Foundation · HBCU-EiR - HBCU-Excellence in · $700K
National Science Foundation · Finders Foundry · $50K
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