How we score

The Takeoverable score asks five questions: is the project alive, is it trusted, can you own it, can a small business run it, and does it do the job. Each pillar has a fixed point budget. A signal earns points only when we measured it.

Snapshot date: 2026-10-15. Stars, licences, push times, release feeds, Docker files, and OpenSSF Scorecard results come from that capture. If a number was not in the capture, the app page says “not measured”.

Pillars

Alive · 20 points

Is somebody still shipping it?

Last push · 40% of this pillar
Releases in 12 months · 30% of this pillar
How fast issues close · 30% of this pillar

Trusted · 20 points

Would you leave customer data on it?

OpenSSF Scorecard · 35% of this pillar
Open critical or high vulnerabilities · 30% of this pillar
Contributors in 90 days · 15% of this pillar
Bus factor · 10% of this pillar
Stars · 10% of this pillar

Takeoverable · 25 points

Can you own it, change it, and leave?

Licence · 40% of this pillar
Stack · 15% of this pillar
Tests and CI · 15% of this pillar
Docs quality · 15% of this pillar
Data export · 15% of this pillar

Easy to run · 20 points

Can a small business actually put it into production?

One-click deploy · 35% of this pillar
Managed cloud or done-for-you · 25% of this pillar
Docker Compose · 20% of this pillar
Memory needs · 10% of this pillar
Setup steps · 10% of this pillar

Feature fit · 15 points

Does it do the job of the SaaS you pay for?

Coverage of the incumbent’s main jobs · 100% of this pillar

Rules that keep the number honest

An archived repository scores zero for Alive.
Last push: 30 days = full, 90 days = 0.7, 180 days = 0.4, 365 days = 0.2, older = 0. The 181–365 band is our interpolation. The spec named the other cutoffs.
Stars use a log scale capped at 20,000.
Licence points: permissive 1, weak copyleft 0.85, GPL 0.75, AGPL 0.6, source-available 0.2, SeatLess owned-code 1.
Docs quality, setup steps, memory needs, vulnerability counts, and 90-day contributor counts are omitted in this build. We do not fill them with guesses.
Feature fit is an editorial average of jobs we marked yes, partial, or no. Unassessed apps leave the pillar blank.
A CI file at a common path scores half of the tests-and-CI signal, because we did not separately confirm a test suite.

Badges

Caution if the repo is archived, the licence is source-available, or a critical vulnerability is recorded.
Hobby project if stars are under 200, or 90-day contributors are one or fewer, and Caution does not apply.
Owner-safe only when the score is at least 75, Alive is at least 60% of its points, vulnerabilities were actually checked, none are critical, and a human has verified the listing. Nothing in this first build is human-verified, so the badge is not used yet.
Needs a techie when the score is 55–74, or when there is no one-click and no done-for-you path.

SeatLess

SeatLess apps are scored with the same function. They have no public repository, so they cannot earn GitHub health points. They are not pinned above higher scores. The owned-code licence signal is an operator attestation, disclosed on the app page and on disclosure.

Cost

Three-year SaaS bill = seats × price per seat × 36. Owned = setup fee + hosting × 36 + upkeep × 36. Where we could not confirm a vendor list price, the calculator starts empty. Type the figure on your invoice.