Oetzi for open source: the threads where people pick a project

Your project is good and nobody knows it exists. Oetzi is an AI marketer for open source maintainers: it listens on seven platforms for the threads where someone is choosing between projects like yours, scores each one 0 to 100 for buying intent, and drafts a reply in your voice. You approve everything, at $49 a month with 100 credits included.

Where do people ask which open source project to use?

Hacker News carries the heaviest version: an Ask HN thread about self-hosting, or a post about your problem where people name alternatives underneath. Reddit runs the everyday version in the subreddit for your language, usually phrased as "is there a maintained alternative to X". On X a developer says a project changed its license and asks what people moved to. LinkedIn carries the company version, and Threads, Bluesky, and Substack Notes catch the rest.

Two things make this reader different. An upstream license change moves whole groups at once, and "is this still maintained" is a buying question. Find customers on Reddit shows those threads.

What does a week with an AI marketer look like for a maintainer?

You paste the project URL. Oetzi reads the site, pulls the segments, the projects you are compared against, your voice, and the questions people ask before adopting, then drafts a listening signal. You edit the sentence. "People asking for a maintained alternative to a stalled logging library" is enough, and seven days backfill immediately.

Matches arrive on your cadence with the intent score, the reason written out, and a tag for who is talking: buyer, current customer, feature request, or competitor user. Read the current customer and feature request tags first, since they say what the docs failed to explain. Hacker News is where most of these land for an open source project, and a Show HN thread keeps ranking long after the day it was posted.

Which credits does an open source project spend at $49 a month?

Reading is free: the inbox, translation, voice, edits, publishing, post metrics, the trend scan, tracked links, and the outcomes ledger.

A sweep of one signal across every platform is 2 credits and refunds when nothing qualifies, so two signals three times a week is about 48 credits. A drafting run is 1 credit, so two posts a week is 8 credits. Three share of model questions a month is 6 credits and says whether the engines name your project or the commercial one beside it. That is about 62 of the 100 included credits. On a free account, 10 trial credits with no card is five sweeps.

What should a maintainer not expect?

No cold outreach. It never messages strangers, never scrapes contributor lists, and never emails your users.

Nothing posts without approval, and autopilot is off by default. It does not write docs, review pull requests, or triage your backlog. It tells you which public conversations are worth your Saturday.

Questions

Is social listening for open source projects worth it with no budget?

Reading costs nothing and the free tier gives 10 credits with no card, which never expire. A sweep of one signal across all seven platforms is 2 credits and refunds when nothing qualifies, so a slow week costs almost nothing. If the threads are real, the plan is $49 a month with 100 credits included.

How do I find people switching off an unmaintained project?

Describe that moment in one sentence, something like "people asking what to move to now that a project has gone unmaintained". That becomes native searches per platform plus a scoring rubric. Matches arrive with an intent score, the reason written out, and a who-is-talking tag, so someone actively migrating sorts above someone grumbling about software.

Can it help if my project is the free tier of a commercial product?

Yes, and the share of model check matters more in that case. It asks your category's buying questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI for 2 credits per question, shows who was named instead of you, and lists the threads and pages those answers cited. Those threads are usually where your next reply belongs.