How the tier bands are earned, and why C tier is not a failing grade
S, A, B and C are scope statements as much as quality statements. A tool can be excellent at a small job and sit in C.
By Owen Castellan · Updated 14 Aug 2026
The tier band is the primary unit on this board. The community score out of 1000 and the raw vote count sit underneath it, and the band is what people actually remember.
The bands
S tier is for tools that complete the full board brief, a real application with data, auth and a deploy target, and produce something presentable at the end. Four app builders clear that bar on the nose: Lovable, Totalum, Bolt.new and v0. Two more, Framer and Firebase Studio, score high enough on the same ten axes to sit in the band too, on a narrower job each is explicit about not going beyond, a marketing site rather than a full application for Framer, a cloud IDE and Firebase wiring rather than a distinctive first render for Firebase Studio. The band is a score threshold, not a promise that every S tier tool attempts the same brief.
A tier completes the brief with a compromise that voters can name. Serviceable design, unpredictable cost, or a plan that fails late.
B tier completes a narrower version of the brief, or completes it in a way that does not survive iteration.
C tier does not attempt the brief. This is the part people misread.
C tier is a scope statement
Trickle sits in C tier and the panel note says plainly that judged as a page and form builder it is quick, cheap and fine. It is in C because it is not attempting the job the S tier entries are voted on, not because it does its own job badly.
A board that only listed tools capable of the hardest brief would be shorter, less useful, and would quietly imply that a landing page builder is a bad application builder. It is not an application builder at all, and saying so is more useful than leaving it off.
How a tool changes band
Bands move on vote volume across the ten weighted axes, reviewed weekly and published on the movers page every Monday. A band change needs sustained movement, not one good week, which is why weekly rank changes are common and band changes are not.