12/31/2025
I started building Vaporlens almost a year ago - on the evening of Jan 16th I made my first commits. It was called SteamSift and it was just a couple of games in a static page demo. I shared it on Reddit and got some incredible feedback. About a month later, I launched the Vaporlens.app website.
The first month was pretty quiet - if not for Reddit, I'd probably have gotten fewer than 500 unique visitors. Those same visitors stuck around for the next few months, and so I kept working on it whenever I had free time and it kept slowly growing. Over the months, I've received some incredible feedback, ideas, suggestions and much love. So, I kept improving it. Slowly, weekend after weekend, month after month. Trying to stay within my 10 euro/month budget.
Then, I spent some time on SEO (thanks to LLMs, since I have very little experience with it) - and things accelerated slightly. In September, I saw unique visitors jump from ~500/mo to ~2.5k/mo. This trend continued with Vaporlens getting over 5k visitors in October and over 6k in November. I was pretty happy with this growth. It was pretty crazy for a project with barely any investment (time or monetary, really).
And then came December. You see, there's this browser extension called AugmentedSteam. It's a neat little extension that adds a whole lot of info to Steam store pages from a variety of third-party sources - SteamDB, ProtonDB, third-party store prices, etc. Very handy, been using it for ages. I thought - wouldn't it be neat to add Vaporlens to it? And since the extension is open source, I went ahead to GitHub and opened an issue asking the maintainer whether he'd be interested in adding a Vaporlens summary to it. I honestly didn't think it'd be a "yes", but hey, why the hell not ask. To my surprise, he said "yes". So I prepared and sent a PR. And it was accepted (albeit with some extra work, huge thanks to tfedor for guiding me on this and bringing the PR over the finish line). I knew AugmentedSteam had ~500k users. I knew my tiny 10 euro server would not handle that, so I tried my best to prepare for the inevitable release of the new version with Vaporlens in it.
I tweaked my Postgres indices and queries to ensure they were fast, I tweaked my Node app to ensure it was efficient, and I added Cloudflare cache to make sure whatever could be cached and served from the edge - was. And then, on December 13th, the new AugmentedSteam version with Vaporlens in it was released. My server struggled because I had missed some things. It did slow down, but it did not go down - which was a win in my book!
I did not expect my tiny weekend project to blow up this much. And it blew up in all sorts of ways - from the number of users, to the number of requests, to the amount of love, and - surprisingly - the amount of hate (and death threats) I've received because some people perceived it as "AI slop". I've tried asking them why, but unfortunately nobody replies after sending initial threat emails :(
I closed December with over 600k unique users and over 8M requests served, with over 2500 games analyzed (some even multiple times!) and over 350 games in queue waiting their turn (this is going to take some time 😅).
I did not expect my tiny project to grow 1000x in just a year. On a 10 euro monthly budget. This has been a wild year for Vaporlens. And this is just the beginning, because I've got ideas.
So, here's 2026, all of you who supported me and to tiny game analysis projects :D
Cheers 🥂
Tim