How we find and check tools

Every day we look for open-source projects that are taking off, and explain the useful ones in plain English.

Where we look

GitHub's public search (new projects gaining stars, self-hosted tools and open-source alternatives) and Hacker News stories that link to GitHub.

What we check

• Licence: read from the project's licence file and sorted into permissive, weak copyleft, copyleft or unclear. This decides whether you can build a paid product on it.
• What it needs to run: your computer, a small server, a GPU, or a browser.
• Growth: stars gained per day. Brand-new projects with huge star counts and almost no forks are flagged, because bought stars exist.
• Safety: we don't list malware, exploits, cracking tools, or anything built to break other services' rules.

How summaries are written

Summaries are drafted by an AI model running on our own computer, from each project's README. Licence, safety and star-pattern checks are automatic rules. We spot-check summaries, but some may contain mistakes, so please tell us if you find one. "Could replace" suggestions are our opinion of the overlap with a paid product, not a claim that every feature matches.

Who we are

An independent project. We're not affiliated with any of the projects listed, and we don't accept payment for listings.