10,000 website scans later, here's what I learned building a free BuiltWith alternative

It started with frustration with existing tools.

I was doing competitor research for a project and needed to understand what technology stack a few websites were running. Simple enough task.

But, it was not that simple.

I was using BuiltWith. The interface felt like it was designed in 2009 and hadn't been touched since. The free version gives you almost nothing useful and the paid plan starts at $295/month, for what is essentially a lookup tool.

I even tried Wappalyzer. It gives you a raw list of technologies with zero context. Great, this website uses React. So what? What does that tell me about their infrastructure choices, their security posture, their scalability?

I kept hitting the same wall. Every tool would tell me what a website was running. None of them could tell me what it meant.

That was the moment I decided to build TrueTechFinder.

Three weeks from idea to first version

I shipped the first working version in three weeks. It was rough, detection was limited, the UI was basic, and the AI insights were nowhere near as useful as they are today. But it worked. You could type in a domain and get back a structured breakdown of what technology the site was running.

The hardest part was not the detection itself, it was making sense of what was detected. Identifying that a site uses Cloudflare is straightforward. Explaining why that matters, what it implies about their infrastructure decisions, and what gaps it reveals that required a completely different layer of thinking.

That's the problem I've been obsessing over ever since. Not just detection. Understanding.

What 10,000+ scans taught me?

After 10,000+ scans and reaching 200+ monthly visitors, some patterns have emerged that genuinely surprised me:

1. Most websites have at least one significant security gap. Even the ones you would expect to be bulletproof. Enterprise sites frequently have excellent CDN coverage but near-zero analytics visibility. They are spending heavily on delivery infrastructure while flying completely blind on performance data.

2. WordPress is far from dead. It's everywhere but almost never alone. The modern pattern is WordPress as a CMS paired with a completely separate frontend layer. Headless is more common than most developers think.

3. The behaviour that surprised me most: many users scan 10+ websites in a single session. They are not just checking their own site, they are doing deep competitive research, auditing client sites, or building a picture of an entire industry's technology choices. That use case wasn't what I originally built for, but it's become one of the most common.

Where it stands today?

TrueTechFinder detects 700+ technologies across 14 categories - CMS, hosting, CDN, frontend frameworks, analytics, security, email, payments and more.

Every scan gives you a Stack Health Score out of 100 with a plain-English AI insight that explains what the stack means for that specific website, not just a list of what was found.

It's completely free. No account needed. Just type in a domain and get results in under 5 seconds.

I am still building. The detection engine keeps improving, the scoring model gets more accurate with every scan, and there are features in the pipeline I am genuinely excited about.

Try it on your own site or a competitor's: www.truetechfinder.com

I also want to ask something - for those of you doing competitor or client research, what's the one thing you wish you could know about a website's technology that current tools don't tell you? That's exactly the kind of feedback that shapes what I build next.