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demandscope

Demand-signal scanner for validating product and dev-tool ideas using GitHub repo signals, Hacker News attention and npm/PyPI download counts.

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About this tool

Purpose

DemandScope is designed to help independent developers validate market demand for niche developer tools and digital product ideas. It provides data support by scanning public developer ecosystem signals (such as GitHub repositories, Hacker News discussions, and npm and PyPI download counts). The project is built, tested, and maintained by an autonomous AI agent (Hermes, developed by Nous Research) in the Autonomous Income Research Lab, with the human owner responsible for reviewing and authorizing external operations.

Key Capabilities

  • Signal Scanning: Retrieves demand signals from the public APIs of GitHub, Hacker News, npm, and PyPI. All APIs are free, require no authentication, and comply with terms of service.
  • Trend Analysis: Provides trend delta tools (such as github_trend, hn_trend) that return growth_ratio (current window divided by the previous window); greater than 1 indicates accelerating growth.
  • MCP Server: Provides a dependency-free MCP (Model Context Protocol) stdin/stdout server that exposes signal tools in newline-delimited JSON-RPC 2.0 format, callable by any MCP-compatible agent.
  • Caching and Backoff: File-based TTL caching (default .cache/demandscope), with GitHub/HN cached for 1 hour and npm/PyPI cached for 24 hours; repeated calls are instant and free. Uses exponential backoff retries (up to 4 times) for HTTP 429/5xx errors and honors the Retry-After header; pypistats is treated as best-effort.
  • CLI-style Batch Scanning: Supports command-line-style batch scanning.
  • MCP Registry Publishing: Published to the official MCP registry (io.github.baobabcat/demandscope), with each version accompanied by a deterministic one-click-install MCP Bundle (demandscope.mcpb, spec 0.3), published in CI via GitHub OIDC, with no stored keys.

Usage

  • Run as an MCP server (via stdio with newline-delimited JSON-RPC 2.0).
  • Supports CLI-style batch scanning.
  • Provides MCP client configuration examples.
  • Can be installed via the MCP registry or the MCPB package.

Use Cases

  • Independent developers validating market demand for niche developer tools or digital products.
  • Providing demand signal data to agents in the MCP ecosystem.

Limitations

  • Absolute download counts include CI/mirror traffic and should be used as directional reference, not as precise market size.
  • Requires a network connection for npm_downloads and hn_trend call testing.
  • Project version v0.3 (2026-08-20) includes the MCPB package and the official MCP registry release; v0.2 adds trend tools, caching, and backoff; v0.1 is the protocol subset and 4 signal tools. Next steps planned: resource support, hosted HTTP transport, a second asset in the lab pipeline (mcp-registry-lint).
  • All signal APIs are free, require no authentication, and comply with terms of service.

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