Open Source Project Changelog Portal with Contributor Attribution
Why This is an Opportunity
The problem is that open source projects have two audiences for changelogs: users who need to know what changed, and contributors who want recognition for their work. GitHub Releases technically shows PR authors, but it's buried and unformatted. Many popular projects maintain a CHANGELOG.md that's never fun to read and credits nobody. The solution is a simple web app: create a project, paste release notes or import from a markdown file, tag contributors per entry (with GitHub avatar lookup), and generate a shareable public URL. Static page generation with a simple form-based CMS. Perfect CRUD app.
Key Pain Points
- •GitHub Releases pages are functional but visually unappealing and don't prominently feature contributor attribution
- •CHANGELOG.md files in repositories are developer-only artifacts that end users never read
- •Maintainers who want to publicly thank contributors have to manually compile attribution lists
- •No simple way to generate a branded, shareable changelog URL for project announcements
- •Contributors often don't get visible credit for their work unless they're mentioned in a tweet or blog post
Original Discovery
Open source maintainers who want to publish beautiful, public-facing changelogs face an odd tooling gap. GitHub Releases are too raw. Blog posts are too much work. And none of them automatically credit contributors in a way that makes people feel recognized. A hosted changelog portal — one page per project, auto-generated from pasted or imported release data — that highlights contributor avatars, links to PRs, and groups changes by category would serve both the maintainer's communication needs and the contributor's desire for visible credit.
Ready to Build This?
Sign up to save this opportunity and get your personalized MVP kit. Includes domain name suggestions, boilerplate code, and AI prompts to build your MVP rapidly.
Free MVP kit • Domain finder • Starter code