I built a GitHub repository intelligence API — here's what I learned

A developer built RepoAudit, a REST API that audits public GitHub repositories, returning data quality reports and AI-powered complexity scores for issues. The API, built with TypeScript and Express, separates deterministic quality checks from AI scoring using Groq's Llama 3.3 70B, and is deployed on Render with tiered pricing.

Every open source maintainer I've talked to has the same problem. Their GitHub issues are a mess. Missing descriptions. No labels. Tickets open for 8 months with zero activity. New contributors picking up issues that turn out to be 3-week architectural rewrites with no warning. The manual triage never ends. So I built RepoAudit — a REST API that audits any public GitHub repository and returns two things: a data quality report and AI-powered complexity scores per issue. One API call. Structured JSON back. Here's what I learned building it. What it actually does Send a POST request with a repo name: { "repo": "facebook/react", "issue numbers": "36807,36810" } Get back a full audit: { "data quality": { "total open issues": 247, "missing descriptions": 38, "missing labels": 54, "stale issues 90d": 91, "label consistency score": 0.61, "flagged issues": ... }, "issue complexity": { "issue number": 36807, "complexity": "medium", "effort estimate": "4-8 hours", "skill tags": "React", "CI/CD", "GitHub Actions" , "risk flags": "Missing configuration files" , "suggested approach": "Investigate the CI config and update the codesandbox job." } , "summary": "Repo has 247 open issues. 38 lack descriptions, 91 are stale." } The architecture The API is built in TypeScript with Express. Six files, each with a single responsibility: github.ts — fetches issues from the GitHub REST API, paginated, with PRs filtered out auditor.ts — deterministic data quality analysis no AI, runs fast and free scorer.ts — sends issues to Groq's Llama 3.3 70B in batches of 10 for complexity scoring router.ts — Express routes with API key auth and per-tier rate limiting types.ts — shared TypeScript interfaces index.ts — entry pointThe key design decision was separating the data quality analysis from the AI scoring. The quality checks, missing descriptions, stale issues, label consistency, are deterministic. They run in milliseconds and cost nothing. The AI scoring is where the real latency and cost lives. This means if the AI call fails or rate limits, the quality report still delivers. Partial output is better than no output. What I got wrong first My first version had the AI scoring all open issues in one batch. On a repo like facebook/react with 500+ open issues, that meant 50+ API calls to Groq in sequence. Total latency: several minutes. The fix was obvious in hindsight, cap the AI scoring at 20 issues per call for full repo audits. When callers pass specific issue numbers, score all of them. When auditing an entire repo, score the first 20 and flag the rest with quality data only. The rate limiting problem on Render When I deployed to Render, the express-rate-limit package threw this error: ValidationError: The 'X-Forwarded-For' header is set but the Express 'trust proxy' setting is false. Render sits behind a Cloudflare proxy. Without app.set 'trust proxy', 1 , the rate limiter can't identify users by IP — it sees every request as coming from the same proxy IP and either over-limits or under-limits everyone. One line fix. But it took an hour to debug. Three tier pricing The API has three tiers: | Plan | Price | Limit | |---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 10 audits/day | | Starter | $9/month | 200 audits/day | | Pro | $29/month | 500 audits/day | Keys are stored in environment variables on Render. API KEYS for free tier, STARTER KEYS and PRO KEYS for paid. The router checks which list a key belongs to and applies the correct rate limiter dynamically. Not elegant — but it works at zero customers and I can migrate to a database when I actually have customers to migrate. What's next The obvious next step is a GitHub App — install it on your repo and every new issue gets automatically scored as it's filed. No API call required from the maintainer. That's the stickiest version of this product. But I'm not building it yet. First I want to see if anyone pays for the REST API. If they do, I'll know the core value is real and the GitHub App is worth the extra engineering. Try it Free tier is 10 audits/day, no credit card required. Landing page: repoaudit-api.vercel.app GitHub: github.com/KingDavid9999/repoaudit-api RapidAPI: rapidapi.com/KingDavid9999/api/repoaudit If you're building something that needs repo intelligence, that is, bounty platforms, contributor matching, project management tools — I'd love to hear what you're working on.