You asked about Ghost Kitchens
16 people built something like it. 7 are gone.
That is 47% of the ones whose fate we could settle, against 23% across the whole register. 1 were acquired.
| Launched | What it was | Today |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-06-01 | Building India's fast food empire · eatnino.com | gone |
| 2017-06-01 | Pop Meals is a restaurant chain without chefs. All recipes are… · popmeals.com | still up |
| 2022-06-01 | Virtual Restaurants & Stores for Africa · getfoodcourt.com | still up |
| 2018-06-01 | We license brands for delivery and pick-up · purpleplate.co | gone |
| 2020-06-01 | YCByte On-demand food delivery from dark kitchens in Pakistan. · web.thebyte.app | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | AI-Driven Tech & Space Optimization to Scale Restaurants · onestopkitchen.com | gone |
| 2021-01-01 | YCMezli Autonomous restaurants that make great, affordable meals. · mezli.com | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | Increasing restaurant profitability through our AI Operating System · bytekitchen.io | acquired |
| 2021-01-01 | YCTaste Online marketplace for dinners shipped from great restaurants · gettaste.com | gone |
| 2020-01-01 | YCHideout A portfolio of delivery-only restaurant brands · findhideout.com | gone |
| 2022-05-23 | ghost.org | still up |
| 2022-10-21 | typejust.com | still up |
| 2022-10-10 | ghostlabel.io | unverified |
| 2022-01-10 | i.imgur.com | still up |
| 2023-07-30 | esyblog.com | still up |
| 2023-12-18 | HNRagHost raghost.ai | unverified |
| 2023-02-20 | imgur.com | still up |
| 2025-06-01 | YCGhostEye Your always-on red team. · ghosteye.ai | still up |
How this compares
Y Combinator reports its own outcomes, including acquisitions. The other two are judged by asking the domain, so they are not measured the same way and are never averaged together.
The register re-probes every domain it holds. Some that answered last month stop answering. We send that list — what went quiet, and what it was — once a month. Nothing else.
How this was made. Show HN entries are every post from 2021 to 2023 with at least five points that linked to its own domain; code hosts and free hosting are excluded, because a repository outlives the effort behind it. Product Hunt entries needed 100 votes — a far higher bar, so they are the promoted top slice rather than a like-for-like sample. Both are judged by asking the domain whether it still answers: gone means it no longer resolves, refuses the connection, serves a parking page, or says plainly that it shut down. An HTTP error is not counted as gone — a server answering 404 is one somebody still pays for, and an audit of 25 gone-calls found two such sites alive with only a moved homepage. Y Combinator entries use the status YC publishes itself, which is why only those can say acquired. Squatted domains — a lapsed name now serving somebody else's site — are not detected, so these figures run slightly low.