We score every open source repo on whether your PR will get reviewed.

Why star counts mislead developers

A repo can have 50,000 stars and still be effectively dead. The last commit was 18 months ago, the maintainer answered the last issue in 2023, and your carefully-prepared pull request will sit unreviewed forever. Stars are an accumulation metric — they go up and rarely come down. They tell you a project was popular, not whether it is alive today.

Every developer who has tried to contribute to open source knows this gap. You spend two evenings reading a codebase, ship a clean PR, and watch it die in the queue. The problem isn't your PR. The problem is that you were optimising for the wrong signal.

The FoundDev health score

We compute a 0–100 score for every indexed repo using four signals:

• Activity (22%). How many commits in the last 30 days. A repo with weekly commits will merge your PR. A repo with zero commits in six months will not.
• Maintenance (17%).The ratio of closed to open issues, and how quickly recent issues were triaged. This is the strongest proxy for "does a maintainer read this".
• Community (21%). Whether the project has docs, a license, topics, and a non-trivial contributor count. Healthy communities have contribution norms.
• Popularity (19%). Stars, fork velocity, and watcher growth. We deliberately weight this lowerthan the other three signals — it's a tiebreaker, not a verdict.

A 91/100 score on a 2k-star repo is a better contribution target than a 60/100 score on a 50k-star repo. That's the whole product in one sentence.

Who FoundDev is for

First-time contributors. Trying to land your first open source PR? Filter for the beginner-friendlylabel and sort by health score. You'll find projects with active maintainers, good first issues, and a real chance of a merge.

Working developers. Looking to build a contribution streak alongside your day job? Use the language filter to find live projects in your stack. Bookmark them. We track your contributions back to your profile.

Maintainers. Want to know whether your project looks healthy from the outside? Look up your repo on FoundDev. The score tells you exactly what a prospective contributor sees before they decide to invest in your codebase.

How we're different from alternatives

vs GitHub Trending. Trending is a 24-hour star spike, which means it shows you whatever Hacker News linked yesterday. FoundDev ranks by sustained contribution signal, not viral peaks.

vs CodeTriage / Up For Grabs.Those sites surface individual issues. FoundDev surfaces projects. We help you pick the codebase you want to learn; you pick the issue once you're inside.

vs awesome-* lists.Awesome lists go stale. Our index is recomputed every night against the live GitHub API. A repo that died last month will reflect that in tomorrow's score.

Try it

Start with Discover to search the live index, or jump to Trendingto see what's rising this week. Sign in with GitHub to bookmark projects and track your contribution streak.