DEV Community: Param Jaisinghani

What's New in APEX Versus: 3-Way Battles, Daily Duel Streaks, Battle Conditions, and an Embeddable Widget

Param Jaisinghani — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:46:22 +0000

apexversus.com — free AI "who would win" comparisons, no signup required for your first 2/day.

Since my last post here, I shipped a bunch of new stuff. Quick rundown of what the whole thing does now:

16 categories, each with real scoring dimensions

The AI detects what you're comparing and scores it with dimensions that actually fit — anime characters get judged on battle IQ and technique, companies get judged on market share and innovation, animals get judged on strength and survival instinct. Not one generic rubric stretched over everything.

Categories: anime/manga, movie/TV characters, novel/manhwa characters, video game characters, mythological figures, real people, athletes, cricketers, companies, countries, animals, electronics, cars, movies, food, medical products — 16 total, each with its own 7 dimensions.

New since last time

3-Way Battles — rank three entities at once, not just head-to-head
Battle Conditions — re-run a matchup under "Peak Power," "Real World Only," "Lore Accurate," or "One on One Combat" and watch the verdict actually change
Daily Duel — a free daily pick-the-winner game with real streak tracking (3/7/10/30/100-day milestones earn bonus credits)
Embeddable widget — any blogger can drop a 2-line snippet to show a live comparison card on their own page
Google Sign-In alongside email/password

Already there

Radar chart + full written breakdown (why the winner won, key differences, per-dimension reasoning) for every comparison
Power-tier badges (S++ down to C) for fictional characters
Power Rankings — a live leaderboard built from every real comparison anyone's run
Character Picker — ~100+ curated names if you don't know what to type
Public Forum for discussing any matchup
A real methodology page explaining the actual scoring mechanism, not a black box

The honest limitation

It's an LLM's judgment, not a physics simulation — it can be inconsistent on edge cases, and power-scaling for wildly mismatched fictional power levels is still just an AI's best reasoning, not canon. Rather say that upfront than oversell it.

Pricing

Free (5/day signed in, 2/day anonymous), Standard ₹99/mo (150 credits), Pro ₹149/mo (unlimited + 3-Way Battles + Battle Conditions), or ₹10 for a quick 5-comparison top-up.

apexversus.com — try it, no signup wall to start.

I built a single power scale for people, companies and institutions (what worked, what broke)

Param Jaisinghani — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:23:23 +0000

Hi all, I'm a solo builder from India. This is my project, and it's still early, so I'd really value honest feedback.

The idea

Forbes ranks billionaires. Wikipedia describes people. But nothing lets you compare a city mayor, a CEO, a ministry and a tech company on the same scale. ApexHierarchy does that: every profile gets one of 8 tiers (Town → City → State → National → Continental → Global, plus two special tiers), with a Low / Mid / High / Top position inside each tier.

What works today

Search any person, company, institution or country. If it isn't in the index yet, it's researched from public sources on demand (about 25 seconds).
Six dimensions per profile, each with its own tier: Net Worth, Reach, Power, Influence, Network and Legacy, plus a rising/falling trajectory.
A connections map: click from Elon Musk to xAI to its own tier, and keep going. Similar-profile suggestions for exploring.
The Apocalypse Index: a top-10 of entities with the power to reshape world order, plus sourced data on food, water, AI compute and financial plumbing.
A network graph of each profile's connections.
Global rankings, net worth rankings, institutions, city rankings across 40+ cities (Mumbai, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo and more), "richest people in" pages for India, the US and China, "most powerful people in" pages for 13 countries, and an A–Z directory of all 777 profiles.
Every profile lists its sources, marks which are corroborated, and shows a data-confidence score. Anyone can report a mistake, claim their own profile or submit a missing one.
Free to browse; paid plans (from ₹499/month, or $12/month outside India) add more profile views, PDF export, a watchlist, history and a recent-developments feed.

How a profile is made

Public sources → an LLM writes the text and pulls figures → a formula (not the LLM) assigns the tier. Keeping the tier assignment in code, not model output, was a deliberate choice: the model researches and writes, but never gets to decide "this person is Global tier" on its own judgment. There's also a hard reach-based cap: a profile can't be ranked above what its actual public reach supports, no matter what it claims about itself.

What broke and how it was fixed

Wrong photos for namesakes (two different people sharing a name got cross-matched).
Reversed connection labels ("X owns Y" showing up as "Y owns X").
A security policy that silently blocked Google Analytics from loading.
A slug-generation bug that mangled accented characters (Düsseldorf became d-sseldorf instead of dusseldorf).
A dead end for new city-list profiles: the first visitor to a brand-new profile used to only get a real page if they were a paying member — everyone else landed on a "still generating" message that never actually generated anything. Now it generates for the first real visitor regardless of account type.

Numbers

777 profiles, 3,127 connections, 1,648 sources, 40+ cities.

What's next

More city and country lists (each needs 10 fully sourced profiles before it's published), then smaller cities beyond the major hubs. Yearly editions of city lists, the way magazines publish annual rankings. Deeper sourcing and more human verification for the profiles people actually look at.

Honest limitations

Figures are editorial estimates from public sources, not verified financial statements, and profiles are AI-assisted. A few entries are still wrong, and I'm fixing them as they're found. 777 profiles is a small start.

Try it: https://apexhierarchy.com/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch
The Apocalypse Index (the most fun page to start with): https://apexhierarchy.com/apocalypse?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch
Methodology: https://apexhierarchy.com/methodology?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch

What's missing? Who would you search for first? Anything that looks wrong? I'll answer every comment.

APEX Versus: An AI That Instantly Settles Any 'Who Would Win' Argument

Param Jaisinghani — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:31:25 +0000

Ever argued with a friend about who'd win — Goku or Superman? Messi or Ronaldo? Your country vs... any other country? I built APEX Versus to settle exactly this kind of argument instantly, using AI.

Type any two things — real people, anime characters, movie heroes, companies, countries, athletes, even animals — and get an instant, detailed verdict. Free, no account needed.

How it actually works

It's not just "whichever name has more search results." An AI model automatically detects what category your matchup belongs to — there are 16 of them — and scores it on 7 dimensions that actually make sense for that category:

Anime characters → Power, Speed, Durability, Technique, Battle IQ, Willpower, Potential
Athletes → Skill, Athleticism, Achievements, Consistency, Clutch Factor, Legacy, Versatility
Countries → Economy, Military, Influence, Innovation, Quality of Life, Culture, Growth
Plus real people, companies, cricketers, movies, food, animals, mythology, video game characters, cars, electronics, and medical products — each with their own 7 dimensions.

"Naruto vs Goku" and "India vs China" don't get scored on the same axes — the AI picks the right lens and shows a radar chart breakdown, not just a single number.

The fun stuff

⚡ Power Tiers — fictional characters get an 8-tier power-scaling badge, from "C — Peak Human" up to "S++ — Omniversal," the same convention power-scaling communities use
🎲 Surprise Me — one click picks a genuinely plausible random matchup from the same category
🏆 Power Rankings — every comparison ever run feeds a live leaderboard of the highest-scoring entities on the whole site
🗳️ Community Verdict — vote on whether you agree with the AI's call and see the real-time split
💬 Forum — argue it out with other people, not just the AI
🎬 Video export — download your result as a shareable video card
🔗 Embeddable widget — drop a live result card onto your own blog with two lines of code

Why it's not just a toy

Free tier: 5 comparisons a day, zero signup friction
Instant: a real verdict in a few seconds
Consistent: results are cached, so a popular matchup gives everyone the same real analysis instead of a different random answer every time
Careful where it matters: for sensitive categories like medical products, the AI is explicitly instructed to stay informational rather than prescriptive — it's not medical advice, and the app says so clearly

It's a small side project, still improving every week. If you've got a "who would win" argument that's been unresolved for years, go settle it: apexversus.com

My paid AI feature was simultaneously free-for-anyone-to-abuse AND broken for the people actually paying for it

Param Jaisinghani — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:44:56 +0000

A few weeks ago I shipped "Deep Analysis" and "Advanced Analysis" on APEX Versus - an AI "who would win" comparison site. Pay a few credits, get a deeper AI breakdown of any matchup: per-dimension reasoning, a hypothetical scenario, wildcard factors, that kind of thing. Pro plan users are supposed to get it unlimited.

Ran a full debug pass on the codebase this week. Found out the feature had two bugs at once, and they canceled each other out in the worst possible way.

Bug 1: the paywall didn't exist server-side.

The frontend checked credits before calling the API. Normal enough - except the API itself never checked anything. POST /api/compare with mode: 'advanced' and no auth header at all would happily burn a real Gemini call and return real content. No login required, no credit check, no daily cap. The free-tier quota I did have only applied to the basic comparison endpoint - I'd built rate limiting for the wrong door.

I confirmed it with a plain curl request. It worked. Zero auth, zero payment, full output.

Bug 2: the feature was invisible to the people who'd actually paid for it.

Separately, the UI had this line:

deepCard.style.display = isPaid ? 'none' : 'block';

Read that again. The card that lets you use Deep Analysis was hidden whenever the user was on a paid plan. My "Advanced Analysis" button - the one Pro users are paying for - had literally no onclick anywhere in the HTML. The function existed. Nothing called it. Ever. It had been dead code since the day I wrote it.

So: free users who found the right request shape got it for nothing, forever. Paying users couldn't find the button to use the feature they were paying for. Directly opposite of what a paywall is supposed to do, both directions, at once.

The root cause was the same bug wearing two different hats.

I'd tightened Firestore security rules a while back so credit balances can only be written server-side (admin SDK), not by the client - good instinct, closes a real self-serve-credits exploit. But I never went back and updated the code that used to write credits from the browser. It was still there, still running, just silently failing every time:

window.deductPaidCredit = async function(uid) {
  try {
    await updateDoc(doc(db, 'userCredits', uid), { credits: increment(-1) });
    // this write has been rejected by security rules for weeks.
    // the empty catch below means nobody ever found out.
  } catch(e) {}
};

An empty catch block is a great way to make a permission error indistinguishable from success.

Fix was straightforward once the actual shape of the bug was clear:

Moved the credit check and deduction fully server-side, inside a Firestore transaction, before the Gemini call happens - not after.
Deleted the dead client-side deduction function entirely.
Fixed the inverted visibility check so paid users can actually see the feature.
Added the missing button for the half of the feature that never had one.

Then I tested it for real instead of trusting the diff: ran Deep Analysis on a live paid account and watched the credit balance drop by exactly 2, atomically, server-confirmed. First time in this feature's existence that a credit deduction has actually happened.

The lesson that's stuck with me: a client-side check and a server-side check are not the same feature just because they look at the same variable. One is a suggestion. The other is the only one that counts. I had the suggestion and skipped the count for a feature that directly touches revenue, and it took a dedicated audit - not normal usage, not testing, not code review - to surface it, because both failure modes were silent by design (empty catches, hidden UI) rather than loud.

If you're running anything with a credits/paywall system: grep your codebase for every place a balance gets checked, and ask whether that check would survive someone skipping your UI entirely and hitting the API directly. If the answer requires the word "should," it's not actually enforced.

APEX Versus is live at apexversus.com if you want to see the (now-actually-working) Deep Analysis in action - first few comparisons are free, no signup needed.

I Built an AI That Settles "Who Would Win" Arguments — Here's How

Param Jaisinghani — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:12:19 +0000

Every group chat has that debate that never resolves: Messi or Ronaldo, Naruto or Goku, India or China. Someone always says "there's no real answer" and the thread dies. I got annoyed enough by this that I built a site that actually gives an answer.

What it does

APEX Versus lets you type any two people, characters, companies, or countries and get an AI verdict across 7 power dimensions — power, influence, wealth, intelligence, legacy, popularity, and potential. It picks a winner, gives an Apex Score for each side, and explains the reasoning instead of just flipping a coin.

Try it right now, no signup needed for your first few: https://apexversus.com

Why this was harder than it sounds

The obvious approach — "just ask an LLM who'd win" — falls apart fast. Ask the same matchup twice and you get wildly different reasoning, sometimes a different winner entirely. I ended up structuring every prompt around the same fixed rubric (the 7 dimensions), forcing the model to score each one explicitly before it's allowed to declare a winner. That single change took the results from "random vibes" to something that felt consistent and defensible.

Caching was the other half of the battle. Every unique matchup gets computed once via Gemini and cached in Firestore — reads stay public so anonymous visitors get instant results, but writes are locked down server-side (more on why below).

The stack

Frontend: plain HTML/JS, no framework — kept it simple since this was a solo build
Backend: Vercel serverless functions
AI: Gemini API for generating verdicts
DB/Auth: Firebase (Firestore + Auth)
Payments: Razorpay for the paid tier

A real security lesson

Early on, the Firestore rules for the cache collection were wide open — anyone could PATCH a battle's cached verdict directly via the public REST API, no auth required. On a site whose whole product is declaring "winners" about real people and companies, that's a content-injection hole waiting to be exploited. Locked it down so writes only happen through the Admin SDK server-side, reads stay public. Same story for daily-battle content and user credit balances, which I found could be self-granted client-side before the fix. Worth a reminder that "nobody's going to bother" is not a security model, even for a small solo project.

What's next

Referral system, push notifications for daily battles, and expanding the SEO-friendly comparison pages. Built and run solo, so feedback — what's broken, what's missing, what matchup you tried that gave a bad answer — is genuinely useful and I read all of it.

Try it: https://apexversus.com