We audited 14 side-project launches. Zero critical bugs, same quiet flaws.

Originally published on the Prufa blog . Five days ago we audited 49 Show HN launches and found that 78% had a critical bug on day one. This week we pointed the same free audit at a different cohort: 14 products freshly posted to r/SideProject. We expected more of the same. We got the opposite — and it turned out to be more interesting. Not one of the 14 had a critical finding. No broken signup flow, no canonical pointing at the wrong domain, no analytics tag silently swallowing every event. By the measure that matters most on launch day — does the core thing work — these builders shipped clean. And yet every single site had findings. They just all live one tier down, in a layer so consistent it reads like a shared checklist nobody handed out: 11 of 14 sent no analytics events at all. 11 of 14 shipped with no Content-Security-Policy and could be framed by any site (no X-Frame-Options ). 11 of 14 had serious accessibility violations . 12 of 14 had tap targets smaller than 24px on mobile. 9 of 14 took over four seconds to paint their largest element on mobile. 8 of 14 had no canonical link on the entry page. No site is named in this post. The point isn't to embarrass anyone — these are good builders who got a real product live. The point is that the same common side-project launch mistakes show up again and again, and if 11 of 14 strangers have them, you probably have a few too. Methodology, briefly We pulled 20 URLs from recent r/SideProject posts and ran each through the same audit a free Prufa run does: a real browser loads the public pages and captures network traffic, console output, response codes, headers, and the rendered DOM, then a fixed suite of deterministic checks grades the evidence. Same input, same verdict. Of the 20: 14 completed cleanly , 4 were blocked by bot protection before our runner could load them, and 2 didn't finish inside our polling window. The numbers below are from the 14 that completed. Two honest caveats. First, 14 is a small sample —