Top 5 Reasons 2026 Has Been the Year of the Unfinished Economy

Perhaps the biggest change isn’t what developers can build.

It’s who can build at all.

Vibe-coding platform Emergent said in February that it had surpassed 6 million users across 190 countries, with its users creating more than 7 million applications. About 70% of its users had no previous coding experience, according to the company.

Andreessen Horowitz similarly notes that AI coding is allowing founders, developers, designers and product managers to create applications dramatically faster than traditional development allowed.

The result is straightforward:

The world’s capacity to start digital projects has exploded.

Its capacity to operate all of them hasn’t.

Emergent isn’t an isolated example.

Lovable, another major AI software-building platform, has reportedly seen more than 60 million projects launched as the company itself has grown into a multibillion-dollar business.

Those numbers don’t mean there are suddenly tens of millions of viable businesses.

That’s precisely the point.

Some become internal tools. Some are experiments. Some become companies. Others are prototypes, weekend projects, abandoned ideas or products their creators simply stop pursuing.

When the cost of creating the first version collapses, the amount of partially realized digital work can increase dramatically.

That work doesn’t necessarily cease to exist simply because its original builder moves on.

AI’s next phase is accelerating this further.

The evolution from basic “vibe coding” toward more autonomous agentic software development means AI systems can increasingly write code, test it, identify errors, fix them and continue development with less direct human work.

But AI hasn’t eliminated the other requirements of building a business.

Someone still has to deal with:

distribution, customers, positioning, operations, maintenance, pricing, support and deciding whether the project deserves another year of their life.

That’s why the unfinished project shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as a failed idea.

Sometimes the builder simply stopped.

This is where the economics become interesting.

A business can fail while leaving behind:

• code
• domains
• designs
• brands
• integrations
• workflows
• datasets
• research
• documentation
• content
• prototypes

useEmark.com’s own guidance makes this distinction explicitly: failure as a business does not necessarily mean failure as an asset collection.

The same applies to projects that never generated revenue.

Revenue is powerful evidence of demand, but a pre-revenue project can still contain a functioning product, codebase, domain, product logic or technical infrastructure another builder would otherwise have to recreate.

That leads to a different question:

Instead of asking whether the original founder finished it, what has already been built?

The internet developed secondary markets for almost everything physical.

Digital businesses have historically been different.

Established profitable companies can be acquired, but the enormous middle ground between “idea” and “successful company” has often been difficult to package, evaluate and transfer.

That’s the gap useEmark.com is being built around.

The platform supports categories including SaaS products, AI projects, mobile apps, domains, newsletters, content sites, templates, unfinished digital businesses, pre-revenue projects and failed-startup assets. Its stated focus includes projects that may be too early, unfinished, unusual or under-packaged for traditional acquisition platforms, provided they can be explained and transferred clearly.

A buyer therefore doesn’t necessarily have to ask:

“What should I build?”

The question can become:

“What has somebody already started that I could take from here?”

And that’s the central idea behind the Unfinished Economy.