You asked about Ghost Kitchens
11 people built something like it. 7 are gone.
That is 70% 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 |
| 2025-06-01 | YCGhostEye Your always-on red team. · ghosteye.ai | still up |
How this compares
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.