Ten clones in a day, and why we still shipped
At the 24-hour mark, Jonathan Wilke counted three copycats. Twelve hours later he counted at least ten. By Friday night the timeline had become a hall of mirrors: every other post a leaderboard, every other domain a .lol.
Ankan Debbarma put it in one sentence on Saturday morning:
Man this outbid.lol and their clones websites are not stopping, my feed is full of leaderboard bidding websites. @jonathan_wilke sir what a man you are, coming up with such a crazy idea and making more than $100,000 in less than 48 hours is crazy
— @ankandebbarmaa, Aug 22, 2026
That is the weather we shipped into. This post is about that weather, about the clones that are actually different, and about the one we built: Instagram handles, public profiles, a $5 score, no card.
If you only want the credit line, here it is. The original is outbid.lol, launched in this tweet at 11:08pm on August 19, 2026. We are not that site. We started by reading that site.
What a copycat looks like from the inside of the feed
Jim Clyde Monge, writing on Generative AI, listed the pile he was already seeing: claimrank.lol, watchbid.lol, takeone.lol, lastspot.lol, overbid.lol, outrank.lol, spots.lol, bidwall.lol, rankly.vip. He then built his own variation, ClaimRank, with categories, and said so in the piece. That is the adult version of cloning: name the source, change a dimension, ship.
The child version is what Bharath called out on X:
Bruh… even the rules and content are the same as outbid.lol. That’s not inspiration, you just copied the whole concept and gave it a new UI
Jonathan had already asked the same thing in a quieter way: “No credit for outbid.lol in the footer?” That tweet is the whole ethics section, if you need one. If you take the mechanic, say so in a place people actually look.
He also publicly praised two forks that changed the object. Jules’s topapp.lol is mobile apps, App Store icons, a “pay more” line at the top. When we scraped it, Gravity Animals was #1 at $114, with a visitor counter in the thousands, not the millions. Khushal’s whosetheboss.lol made Jonathan realize outbid was missing dark mode. Those are copies with a thesis. The thesis can be thin. It still has to exist.
Then there is the joke-on-the-joke layer. Ahmad Hajj posted that the #1 slot on outbid was $14,018, while flappybid.lol sold the whole site for 24 hours to whoever topped a Flappy Bird clone at 246 points. Meepo said he was remaking the last two days of outbid just to play. Harry Makes wanted a version any creator could spin up on Patreon. The idea had left the original page and was now a genre.
Why the clones arrived so fast
Three reasons, none of them mysterious.
The product is one sentence. Rank is the bid. You can explain it in a screenshot. You can implement a bad version in an evening if you already have a boilerplate and a payments provider. Automatio’s write-up of outbid spent a lot of time on Polar, Postgres, and a three-hour sprint on top of supastarter. Whether or not every hour-count is exact, the stack is not exotic. The hard part was being first on the timeline, not inventing a new kind of database.
The screenshot is the marketing. Every new #1 is a post. Every post is a visitor. Every visitor makes the next bid feel less stupid. Clones wanted that loop. Most of them will not get it, because as Monge wrote, a leaderboard with 50 visitors is not the same product as a leaderboard with a million, even if the code is the same.
The domain pattern is a meme. .lol is doing a lot of work. outbid.lol sounds like a dare. instabid.lol, topapp.lol, flappybid.lol, lastspot.lol — you can hear the genre. Jonathan even tweeted that he didn’t know the TLD existed before he bought outbid, and that someone sharing “outbit” instead of “outbid” meant he might have to buy that too. The name is part of the joke. Clones copied the joke-shape of the URL along with the board.
None of that makes cloning illegal. It makes cloning loud, and it makes the original easy to lose in the noise if the clones do not point back.
The fork we actually wanted
We did not want another URL auction for SaaS. That market got crowded before the weekend was over. The interesting unused object was Instagram.
Instagram is already a vanity Olympics. Follower counts, blue ticks, “1.7K posts,” the little business badge. None of it is a live contest. Nike at 291 million followers is a monument. Cristiano at 678 million is a monument. A 400-follower photographer in your city is a person who would actually fight for a row.
So the thesis is: take the outbid sentence, change the row from a landing page to a public Instagram handle, and drop the credit-card part.
Dropping the charge is the part people will argue with. outbid made $21,499 in a day, $42k in 36 hours, then a six-figure week on the about page. That is the whole reason the clones exist. A board that does not take money looks, from the clone-rush point of view, like a missed trick.
We still dropped it. Instagram profiles are people. The funny version of ranking them by bid is the inversion of follower count, not a real auction that puts a $14,000 invoice on a teenager’s handle. Bids on instabid start at $5 and climb $5 each time you re-add the username. It looks like money because money is the metaphor. It is not a Polar webhook. Jonathan’s “just checking the Polar webhook” tweet is the original. Ours is a scoreboard.
If you want to pay real dollars to sit above joni.ai, go to outbid. If you want to put @yourhandle above @nike on a list, stay here.
How not to be the clone that gets ratioed
A few rules we actually followed, because the timeline was already full of people failing them.
Name the original in the footer and on /about. Jonathan asked. We did it. The about page has his face, his handle, the launch quote, and links to the tweet, the X profile, outbid, and supastarter. This blog is more of that.
Change the object, not just the CSS. Apps (topapp), categories (ClaimRank), Flappy Bird (flappybid), Instagram (us). A new color theme is not a thesis. Bharath is right about that.
Do not pretend you invented the sentence. “No ads. No API keys. No revenue sharing” is his line from the 11:08pm tweet. We talk about it as his line. We do not put it on a hero as if it occurred to us in the shower.
Do not spam DMs selling spots. Srajan posted a screenshot of a mutual who built “something similar,” then DMed him to buy a spot, then got weird when he said no. That is the rotten version of this genre. instabid does not have a spot to sell. You add a public handle. That is the whole write path.
Keep the board readable. outbid’s homepage is a ranked list with prices and click counts. The clones that hurt to look at are the ones that added ten features before they had one good row. We kept one screen: intro, add bar, board.
What the original still has that clones cannot steal
Audience. Timing. The first screenshot.
Kyrylo Silin wrote a useful post in the middle of the spiral: after outbid, people were questioning whether they should build a viral little site or a SaaS they can take pride in. His answer was that those are not opposites. A small site can still be executed well. Pride in execution is fuel.
That is the fork in the road for every clone, including us. You can ship a board that feels ashamed of itself — scraped copy, no credit, a checkout bolted on, a Telegram handle in the footer — or you can ship a board that knows what it is.
We know what we are. We are the Instagram board. We are late on purpose, because the object is different. We are not going to hit $125k this week, and we are not going to tweet a $100k acquisition screenshot. Jonathan already did that. The recap tweets are part of the historical record:
24 hours: 200k visitors, $21,499, 1,500 followers, broken analytics, $100k offer, 3 copycats.
36 hours: $42k, $10k high bid, 1,061,848 visitors, 10 copycats, analytics migrated.
About page later: a live visitor counter past a million, revenue past $125k, high bid $14,013 on joni.ai.
Clones that paste those numbers onto their own OG images are doing a different thing from clones that pick a new dataset. Paste is theft of the story. A new dataset is an argument.
Instagram is a better argument than “also a leaderboard”
Startups on outbid are, mostly, the same tribe. AI tools, agencies, SOC 2 companies, SEO products, “hire developers in Latin America” marketplaces. The board is a food fight at a conference afterparty. That is why Comp AI’s demo win rate story landed. The visitors were the buyers.
Instagram is not a conference afterparty. It is athletes, nail techs, football clubs, fashion brands, meme pages, your cousin. The follower distribution is extreme — 685 million on @instagram, 678 million on Cristiano, then a long slide down to everyone else — and the social graph is personal. Putting those rows in bid order does a different joke than putting SaaS URLs in bid order.
The SaaS joke is: marketing can be a number you type.
The Instagram joke is: fame can lose to spite.
We like the second joke more. It is meaner and more honest about why people open the app.
“Copycat” is going to get thrown at this site anyway
Yes. We know. The genre is outbid. The TLD is .lol. The verb is outbid. Someone will reply to our first post with a screenshot of Jonathan’s board and the word “clone.” They will not be entirely wrong about the mechanic, and they will be wrong about the product.
Mechanic: sorted by bid.
Product: public Instagram profiles, fetched for real, stored on our side, no login, no charge, $5 chips, hide-on-request.
If that is too close for you, you will not like us, and you should go use the original. We will keep linking it. That is a better outcome than a footer that pretends the last 48 hours of X did not happen.
Jonathan, if you are reading this: the credit is in the footer. The launch tweet is in the about page. This post exists because we inspected that tweet and then built a different board. The mechanic is yours. The Instagram egos are ours.
One more thing about speed. The clone wave looks like theft from the outside. From the inside of a Saturday timeline it also looks like a research method. People forked the object — apps, categories, Flappy Bird, Instagram — because that is how you find out which version of the joke still lands once the original screenshot has been seen a million times. Most forks will be gone in a week. A few will still be a page you can send a friend. We are trying to be the second kind.
Everyone else: the feed is full. Add a handle anyway. The clones that matter will still be here in a month, and they will be the ones that changed the object. We changed the object.