free tool · grade any changelog

How healthy is your changelog?

Paste a public URL. We fetch the page, run 31 deterministic checks across freshness, cadence, structure, discoverability, and engagement, then hand back a grade with the fixes that matter most.

Try an example:

We fetch one public page, nothing else. Grade and category scores are free, no signup.

methodology

How scoring works

Five weighted categories, scored 0–100, mapped to a grade. Every check is a plain rule you could re-run by hand. Here is exactly what we look at.

Freshness

25%

Is the changelog alive? Recency of the latest entry and how much shipped in the last 90 days.

5 checks · weight 18/72

Cadence

19%

Is there a rhythm? Typical gap between entries, publishing streaks, and quiet stretches.

6 checks · weight 14/72

Structure

22%

Can a human scan it? Dates, headings, category tags, permalinks, and formatting.

7 checks · weight 16/72

Discoverability

21%

Can anyone find it? Page title, meta tags, feeds, structured data, and indexability.

8 checks · weight 15/72

Engagement

13%

Does it invite a next step? Subscribe options, media, search, and links onward.

5 checks · weight 9/72

the honest fine print

  • 31 deterministic checks, so the same page always gets the same score. No model grades your writing.
  • We fetch exactly one public page as ShipcastBot/1.0 and read the HTML a crawler would see. Client-rendered changelogs will score low, and so will they in search.
  • We keep the score and check results, never a copy of your page.
  • The three-sentence summary is model-written only when an AI key is configured, and it is labeled either way. The score itself never touches a model.
  • The weights are opinionated: freshness and cadence carry 44% of the total, because a stale changelog fails at its one job.

Shipcast writes your changelog for you

Connect GitHub, Linear, or Jira and every week a drafted changelog entry, two LinkedIn posts, and an email digest land in your approval queue, in your voice. Fixing your score becomes a side effect.

14-day trial on paid plans, no card. Lite is free forever.