EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Adaeze N.
Former senior editor, The Pragmatic Engineer. Owns the Daily Drop running order and the weekly editorial board.
A daily intelligence brief, written by the people who used to ship the software.
BestUpdate is the single source of truth for what's shipping in software. We track 14,200+ products, surface the 4% that actually matter, and deliver a daily briefing used by 38,400 product teams to outpace their category.
Read each weekday by teams at Notion, Linear, Vercel, Webflow, and 600+ other Series A–C SaaS companies.
THE FOUNDER STORY
Two engineers who got tired of being the last to know about their own category.
BestUpdate was founded in 2017 in San Francisco by two former engineering leaders — one from Atlassian, one from GitHub — who had spent the previous decade shipping the kind of product updates nobody outside the building ever seemed to read.
The original brief was simple, and a little embarrassing: build the thing they wished had existed during their last product launch, when a competitor shipped a parallel feature and they learned about it from a customer three weeks later. There was no shortage of changelog aggregators in 2017. What was missing was a publication — a daily read, edited by humans, that decided which 4% of the 14,200 tracked product releases actually moved a category.
M. Okafor
Co-founder · Former Eng. Lead, Atlassian
S. Reyes
Co-founder · Former Staff Eng., GitHub
A STANDALONE MANIFESTO
We are bootstrapped, profitable, and editorially independent. That is not a footnote. It is the product.
BestUpdate has never raised a dollar of venture capital. We have never run a sponsored release, a pay-to-publish placement, or a paid placement in the Daily Drop. We achieved profitability in year two and have remained there since, financed entirely by reader subscriptions and our paid tier for product teams who want API access to the indexed changelog graph.
This is unusual for a publication in our category, and we treat it as a structural moat rather than a marketing line. When you read a brief on a Tuesday morning, the only people who influenced what made the cut are on our 22-person staff and the 9-person contributor network. No portfolio company, no growth-stage KPI, no quarterly earnings pressure quietly sorting the running order.
We mention this not because bootstrapping is virtuous, but because the reader's trust is the entire transaction. If a brief is worth opening, it must be worth believing. Independence is the cheapest way we know to make that true.
THE EDITORIAL DESK
22 staff, 9 countries, one daily deadline at 6:30 AM PT.
A curated subset of the leadership team. The full editorial and engineering roster — names, beats, and time zones — is published quarterly in the masthead.
HEAD OF ENGINEERING
Hiro T.
Leads the changelog parser pipeline. Holds the 99.2% field-extraction benchmark against four competing trackers.
HEAD OF RESEARCH
Caitlin R.
Architects the semantic-versioning and migration-impact tagging applied to every indexed release note.
HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS
Reza K.
Runs RSS, Atom, GitHub Releases, and custom JSON-feed integrations with the 14,200 tracked product teams.
+ 18 additional editorial and engineering staff across Lagos, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Tokyo, Mexico City, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Wellington, and Stockholm.
THE NUMBERS, AS OF Q1 2025
Verified scale, cited upstream.
14,200+
Software products tracked across 312 categories — the largest dedicated changelog index on the public web.
3.4M+
Changelog entries indexed since 2017, with semantic-versioning and migration-impact tagging applied.
38,400+
Active newsletter subscribers across the Daily Drop and our category-specific briefings.
47×
Cited on the Hacker News front page in 2024 — more than any other software-tracking publication.
Bootstrapped and profitable since year two. No VC funding ever raised. Tracked site uptime: 99.94% over the trailing 12 months.
CITED BY THE PRESS
A short, deliberate list of editorial mentions.
BestUpdate has been cited as a trusted source by the following publications and communities. Citations are editorial mentions — never paid placements or sponsored endorsements.
- TechCrunch "The wire service for software." — 2024 Tools We Actually Use
- The Verge Cited in 2024 coverage of release-note transparency
- Hacker News 47 front-page citations in 2024, the most of any tracker
- Wired Featured in the 2024 "Tools We Actually Use" roundup
- Product-Led Alliance "Best Software Intelligence Source 2024" — Summit Award
Want to republish a figure from this page? Email [email protected] — we license our data, not our quotes.