Vet a technical co-founder before the equity conversation.
Equity is the most expensive promise you will ever make on the thinnest information. Plaza helps you vet a technical co-founder the way an investor would vet you: contribution history that proves the building, measured rather than described, and evidence you can point at instead of impressions you have to trust.
The work, verified
A Trust Score built from real commit history and ownership evidence — what they have shipped, in public, before any equity is discussed.
The claim, sourced
Every skill on the profile is backed by the repositories it was measured from, so you can open the code instead of taking the CV's word for it.
Still shipping
Measured recency, not a checkbox someone ticked: how many repositories a builder pushed in the last 90 days, so an account that is shipping this quarter reads differently from one that stopped two years ago.
Before you start.
Vet a technical co-founder before the equity conversation?
Equity is the most expensive promise you will ever make on the thinnest information. Plaza helps you vet a technical co-founder the way an investor would vet you: contribution history that proves the building, measured rather than described, and evidence you can point at instead of impressions you have to trust.
How does Plaza verify people?
Plaza ranks builders on evidence measured from their public repositories, not on claims. It reads a builder's public GitHub account — repository languages counted in bytes, push dates, stars and topics — computes a Trust Score from that activity, and ranks every match as 0.85 × skill-evidence coverage + 0.15 × trust score. The arithmetic and the repositories behind each result are shown, and a builder with no measured evidence for a skill you asked for is never returned.
Can I contact someone through Plaza?
Plaza publishes no contact details, so nothing here can flood an inbox: reaching a builder takes a structured request that states why you are getting in touch, nothing further reaches them unless they accept it, and there is a cap on how many anyone can send in a day.
What does Plaza actually measure about a collaborator?
Only public GitHub evidence, read through the REST API: languages counted in bytes, when each repo was last pushed, repos owned, followers and stars. Nothing is self-reported and no model invents a number — these are constants in the code.
- Skill strength
- 50% recency · 30% measured volume · 20% breadthThe three terms behind one skill's strength (app/lib/match.ts).
- Self-declared topics
- kept at 60% strengthA repo topic the owner typed is weaker evidence than bytes we counted, so it is discounted rather than trusted.
- Final ranking
- 85% skill coverage + 15% Trust ScoreCoverage dominates on purpose: the question is whether they can do this, not whether they are famous.
- Trust Score, out of 100
- code depth 28% · repos owned 18% · recency 15% · cadence 12% · account age 12% · stars 8% · followers 7%Seven components (app/lib/github-evidence.ts). Followers and stars — the two numbers you can accumulate without writing code — are worth 15% together.
- Recency half-life
- 60 daysNot a yes/no 'active' badge: someone who pushed yesterday reads differently from someone who pushed on day 89.
- Cadence window
- 90 days, saturating at 30 reposHow much ground an account covered recently, counted from push dates.
- Repos-owned band
- 1 repo to 100 reposLog-scaled between a floor that says nothing and a knee only the top of the real population reaches.
- Account-age band
- 6 months to 15 yearsMeasured from the GitHub account's own creation date, never self-reported.
- Language bytes read
- the 8 repos pushed most recentlyGitHub allows 60 unauthenticated REST requests in 1 hour, so byte-level detail is spent on the freshest work first.
- Cost to search
- US$0, no accountSigning in with GitHub is also free; it indexes your own public activity so others can find you.
- Contact limit
- 5 outgoing requests per 24 hoursA per-person cap, so nobody can be volume-mailed through Plaza.
- Sign-in session
- 30 daysA signed cookie, refreshed on sign-in. Plaza stores no password of yours at all.
How do you check that a developer really wrote what they claim?
Five things people actually do, and what each one can and cannot establish. Reading a CV proves nothing checkable; an interview measures interview performance; public code proves authorship but only of public code.
| Method | What it actually proves | Typical time | Cost | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A CV or résumé | Nothing checkable — every line is written by the candidate | 1–2 minutes to read | US$0 | No claim on it points at an artifact you can open |
| Reading their GitHub by hand | Authorship of public repos, if you open each one | 10–20 minutes per person | US$0 | Does not scale past a shortlist; forks and starred repos read like their own work |
| A technical interview | How they solve one fresh problem while watched | 45–60 minutes, two people | 1–2 hours of engineering time | Measures interview performance, not what they have shipped |
| A take-home exercise | New code they wrote for your prompt | 4–8 hours of theirs, 30 minutes of yours | Unpaid work, or a real fee | High dropout, and it still says nothing about their past work |
| Plaza's measurement | Bytes of each language in their public repos, push dates and stars — with every repo cited | Under 1 minute | US$0 | Blind to private and company-internal work, which is most work |
Only the last row is measured by Plaza. The times and costs on the other four are typical industry practice, stated as ranges — we did not measure them, and the table says so rather than dressing an estimate up as a finding.
Where can you verify all of this yourself?
Every input Plaza reads is a documented, public GitHub endpoint, and every figure above is a constant in open code. These are the first-party specs — not commentary about them.
- GitHub REST API — Repositories — the endpoint every repo, star count and push date on Plaza is read from
- GitHub REST API — Users — account age, public repo count and followers, the three account-level trust inputs
- GitHub REST API — rate limits — why an ingest reads language bytes for 8 repos and not for all of them
- GitHub's own OpenAPI description — the machine-readable contract for the responses above, published by GitHub
- api.github.com/rate_limit — live — open it and GitHub itself returns the 60-per-hour figure quoted above
- git log — Git reference manual — the same authorship record, readable offline once you have cloned the repo
- Open Source Guides — how to contribute — what public contribution history does and does not say about a person
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