I’ve been watching the micro-SaaS and startup acquisition space for a while now, and one thing started to really bug me. There is so much "zombie software" out there. You find a cool tool, you're ready to drop money on a yearly sub, but you have no clue if anyone is actually still home. Is the founder still pushing code, or did they sell it to a holding company that’s just milking the last few customers without fixing a single bug?
I wanted a way to see the "pulse" of a project instantly. Not just a "last updated" date, but a real sense of activity. So I built GitPulse.
It started as a 12-hour weekend project to turn GitHub data into clean, embeddable badges and repository profiles. The idea was simple: give founders a way to prove their project is alive and give users the peace of intuition they need before hitting "subscribe."
Then a founder friend told me: "Hey, I’d love to see my own dev activity as a timeline too." Not just a green contribution square, but a story of which projects I worked on and when. So I added a developer profile feature that maps out your journey. It’s great for showing the "builder behind the product" and, honestly, just fun to look back on.
A quick word on privacy, because I know how sensitive this is: I want to be 100% transparent about data. GitPulse reads metadata, and for Pro users, it also looks at commit messages. Why? To classify the work into categories like "Maintenance", "Features", or "Refinement". This gives a much better summary of what a dev is actually doing.
Crucially: I never, ever touch or read your actual source code. The commit messages are processed on the fly to generate the classification and are not stored, cached, or leaked anywhere. You can also keep your entire profile private or protect specific repositories with a password if you only want to share them with certain people. For private repos, there’s an anonymization feature so you can show the activity without revealing the project name. It’s built to be as "stealth" as you want it to be.
The launch was a bit of a disaster, though.
I didn't expect much, but suddenly 600 people were on the site within hours. I hadn't even thought about GitHub API rate limits or using user-side API keys because I wanted to keep the friction low. The whole thing just collapsed. I had to pull the site into maintenance mode, move everything over to BullHQ and Redis, and actually build a proper job system to handle the fetches without getting banned by GitHub.
It’s back up now, and I’m still figuring out the path forward.
I have a ton of features in mind for the future, but right now I’m looking for a "proof of concept" and, frankly, a bit of revenue to make sure I’m not coding myself into a deficit. The server costs and API heavy-lifting add up quickly.
Right now, there’s a free tier for public profiles (last 365 days). I’m also playing around with a "Snapshot" lifetime deal ($9) for people who just want their private repos shown with a weekly sync, and a Pro version for those who want their profiles/badges to be updated daily and fully automated.
I’d love to hear what you guys think – especially about the "trust factor" of showing dev activity to potential customers. Does it actually help you decide whether to buy a tool?