Why I built BreakPoint — and what it's actually for

AI made starting free. Someone still has to finish.

That sentence is on the landing page. It's the whole thing, in eight words. Every other part of BreakPoint — the 8 verticals, the free-for-individuals pricing, the handoff flow, the marketplace, the audit tool — is implementation. The pitch is the pitch.

The pattern is the same everywhere

Open source gets the most attention, but the same shape shows up in every category of project:

• Code — Among popular GitHub projects, 16% were abandoned; 41% of those came back when a new maintainer stepped up (Avelino et al., 2019). A maintainer walks away and the next user has no idea.
• Side projects — the weekend hack that became useful, then died when the author got busy.
• Writing — the unfinished novel, the half-written memoir, the blog series that stopped at post 3.
• Art — the sketchbook full of unfinished drawings, the illustration series that stopped at #5.
• Music — the half-finished album, the song that stopped at the bridge.
• Home — the half-painted room, the kitchen remodel that stopped at demo.
• Business — the MVP that didn't ship, the side hustle that lost steam.
• Learning — the course you signed up for and never completed, the language you started and stopped.

The numbers differ. The pattern is the same: people start things, then walk away. The walk-away is not the end of the story. It's the start of the second chapter. BreakPoint is the platform that makes that visible.

What BreakPoint isn't

It's not GitHub Issues. That's for ongoing support. It's not Stack Overflow. That's for Q&A. It's not Adoptoposs — Adoptoposs was a 2019 directory of projects looking for maintainers. It was read-only. There was no adoption flow. The directory still exists but it doesn't move projects from "looking" to "adopted."

BreakPoint is the only platform with the full handoff flow:

1. The original creator drops the project with a story, the GitHub URL, the next steps, and the license.
2. The project appears on the adoption feed with the status "Looking for a new maintainer."
3. A new maintainer sees it, claims it via the Adopt button, and the project flips to "adopted."
4. The original creator stays credited forever. The new maintainer ships. The vision lives.

No calls. No middlemen. No "let's set up a meeting." Two minutes to drop. One tap to adopt.

Why 8 verticals, not just "open source"

The original 2026 design was for open source. That was always the first vertical. But the second vertical — side projects — was obvious from the start, because every open source maintainer has at least three side projects they walked away from. The same pattern, in a different category.

Once you admit side projects, the rest follow. Writing. Art. Music. Home. Business. Learning. The 8-vertical split was a deliberate early decision because the platform works the same way for each one: drop, adopt, ship. The categories differ in details (a writing project doesn't have a GitHub link; a home project has photos not tech stack) but the handoff flow is identical.

Why free for individuals

The people dropping projects aren't the people with money. The original creator usually has no budget, no audience, no leverage. They walked away. The new maintainer is often a hobbyist or junior developer. Charging either of them breaks the flywheel.

The paying customer is somewhere else. Two paths:

1. The B2B audit. A CTO whose team depends on a critical OSS package wants to know if that package is at risk of being abandoned. The free audit at /audit answers the basic question. The paid tier is for ongoing monitoring and a one-page memo you can hand to the board.
2. The marketplace fee. On the rare paid transfer (someone's buying an abandoned codebase, IP, or small business), the buyer and seller arrange payment directly. BreakPoint takes nothing today, because no payment runs through us; a 5% fee may apply once in-platform payments ship.

The newsletter sponsorship rounds it out. Three revenue paths. None of them charge the people who actually use the product.

What I want BreakPoint to be in 5 years

The default destination when someone walks away from a project. Not the only one — sometimes the project really is done, and that's fine. But the first one that comes to mind. The place where you go to say "I'm out, and I want this to find someone who'll keep it alive."

A vision should never die just because the person who had it ran out of time. The platform exists to make the handoff possible — and visible, and credited, and celebrated when it works.

If you have a project you walked away from, drop it. Two minutes. You stay credited forever. Someone out there wants to finish it.

Related reading

• Bus factor in open source — the single biggest risk factor for the projects on this platform.
• Why side projects never die, they pause — the reframe that changed how I think about the feed.
• The 2026 open source abandonment report — the data behind the "88% of repos are abandoned" stat.