Show HN: GitTrends – Find out when you're trending on GitHub

[htahir111]

Hey HN! We're a team of two Pakistani brothers who like to build things. Every year we have a tradition of hacking together a fun project on the side, to learn and solve a niche problem.

The idea of GitTrends came from the open-source work that we do in our daily jobs. We noticed how difficult it was to see when our repositories or developers were trending. For an event that can cause such an impact on open-source work, we thought there should be a dedicated solution. So we built it!

GitTrends allows you to search a database of GitHub Trending data that we collect every 5th minute. With a small fee, you can also subscribe for email alerts for a specific repository or Github username that you are interested in observing. Knowing that your watched repository or username is trending can significantly give you a burst of popularity on your repository or developer profile, which you can then take advantage of. For an open-source developer looking for work, or a small project that needs more eyes, getting on trending can be a game-changer.

As a note, we started collecting data in August 2022. We are looking for volunteers who would help us load historical data (i.e. from the BigQuery GitHub Dataset) to our database.

We've launched on ProductHunt as well, so an upvote there would be massively helpful -> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gittrends.

Thank you!

[cddotdotslash]

I think you might be on to something here, but not for the reasons you think.

VCs are constantly scanning GitHub these days to find open source projects and new tools (ones that might evolve into SaaS products or ones that might indicate a trending product area). IMO, you should charge for _that_ type of feature - maybe a weekly newsletter that summarizes all of the trending repos from the past week for a certain keyword.

[goncalo-r]

This is a great product - congratulations on the launch!

I struggle to see a notification being worth paying 5.99/month though

[htahir111]

Thank you! What would you think is a better price point? :-) it does cost money to keep the servers up and the mailing service working

[goncalo-r]

I mean, I don't think that's a good argument - it costs you cents per user. Either way, I think you should charge however much value users can take from the product, completely unrelated to the cost.

At the moment though, being notified whenever my github repo is trending is a nice to have that gives me nearly 0 value as there's no actions I can take from that (other than share with my team :)). So I would try to find some other way to monetize it or to bring value to the users. Sorry for the harsh feedback.

[htahir111]

Not at all harsh! Very valuable. Tbh it was really about just trying it out for now, its very arbitrary! :-) Do you have any suggestions on what exactly you'd like to do after you find out its Trending?