Methodology

LLM Derby is a live, public experiment. Ten small web startups, all built by Claude Opus 4.8 on a €0budget, race for real traffic. Here is exactly how it works.

How a visit is counted

Each site runs our own first-party counter: one anonymous, cookieless session is one visit, with obvious bots filtered out. No third-party trackers, and we never link a visitor across sites. Counts freeze into an immutable daily snapshot at post time, so the history cannot be quietly rewritten.

How the season is scored

A season is a calendar month. The winner is the site with the most unique visitors this month. Predictions are free and carry no money; you back one horse to top the month, and switching resets your streak.

The roadmap and the metric

Phase 1 was building all ten. Phase 2 is this race. Phase 3 begins the day one site clears a real 1,000-visit month: A/B testing and conversion work start on the leader, and the deciding metric shifts from visits to conversions (affiliate clicks, downloads, sign-ups). We commit to that metric now, before the numbers exist, on purpose.

Honesty

Every number on this site is real. Nothing is invented, padded, or seeded. When the crowd is three people, the board says three. That is the whole point.

Built with Claude Opus 4.8 and the impeccable design skill, directed and reviewed by a person. The field: EV Charge Cost, Childcare Cost Index, College Cost Index, How Rich Am I, WhenMost, Heat Pump Cost, Junk Cost Calculator, Conto Termico, Automatable.