🚗 Almost 2 million visitors in 3 days: how one person created the main people's fuel map

Amid fuel shortages, the project GdeBENZ exploded in popularity — a people's web map where drivers mark real-time fuel availability and queue lengths. The logic is simple: no registration or apps, everything in the browser. One person marks, another confirms — hundreds save time.
The project was "vibe-coded" by one person. The service barely handles the load, but the author fundamentally refuses "black" monetization — for now, the project lives only on donations.

📈 Some stats from the first three days:
• 1.8 million unique visitors (812k in the first two days).
• 13.2 million page views and 3.5 million visits (Yandex.Metrica data).
• >100,000 user marks (article on vc.ru).
• 80,000 installations of the map on smartphone home screens.
• 2,000 manually added gas stations.

Now how it was done:
The author is Evgeny Chudov. A marketer, founder of the Marketly exchange, a network of channels with 2M+ subscribers, and creator of the bot "Otloshka". So he already had distribution. He came up with the idea for the service on a plane, and by evening everything was working.

The project was entirely built using Claude. When asked about development, Chudov admits: "Countless crutches and tokens." In a couple of days, he burned through almost two weeks' worth of the expensive Claude Max plan.

🚨 Growth problems, hate, and scammers
— In the first day, the backend jumped from server to server. The infrastructure wasn't ready for such a surge, so users still experience lag.
— Chudov wants to monetize the project only with "useful ads," refusing scammers.
— Amid the hype, a fake coin "GdeBENZ" was already released; the author had to publicly disavow it.
— Chudov refuses to disclose fuel shortage analytics, as the project has already been accused of being usable to find targets for strikes.

💡 When a massive need for a niche service suddenly arises, a lone developer with AI fills it faster than any corporation. Tinkoff released its own Toplivo map with fuel availability only two weeks later.


📲 MAX 👮‍♂️ VK ☺️DZEN 🙃 SETKA ✈️ TG #trends #app #application #gasoline #ai #neuralnetwork #claude