The side-project graveyard

Open your GitHub profile and scroll past the pinned repos. Somewhere down there is the graveyard — the expense tracker you built over three weekends, the API wrapper for a problem you no longer have, the SaaS that made it as far as a landing page and a hopeful TODO.md. You’re not the exception. You’re the overwhelming rule. The interesting question is the one nobody asks: is any of it still worth something?

It’s easy to assume the answer is no. A project you stopped touching feels like a failure — proof you didn’t finish, didn’t ship, didn’t follow through. But “abandoned” is a statement about your attention, not about the code’s value. And when you look at the actual numbers on how side projects live and die, a clear picture emerges: the graveyard is enormous, it’s completely normal, and a lot of what’s buried in it isn’t dead at all.

The scaleA graveyard the size of GitHub

Start with the sheer volume. GitHub is the largest collection of unfinished software ever assembled, and it grows by hundreds of projects a minute. Most of what’s created there was never going to be a maintained product — it’s experiments, weekend builds, and ideas set down and never picked back up.

Those are GitHub’s own 2025 Octoverse figures. Line them up and the takeaway is blunt: the graveyard isn’t a sad corner of the platform — it is the platform. For every repo that becomes a maintained product, there are hundreds that got a burst of commits and then went quiet. Yours is in good company.

How they dieMost repos go quiet — and stay quiet

Projects rarely die from a decision. They die by drift. The commit graph tells the story everywhere: an intense green streak at the start, then a scatter, then nothing. It happens to serious open source too — one large study of popular, established projects found 16% were eventually abandoned by their core maintainers. If it happens to projects with stars and real users, the odds for a solo weekend build are steeper still.

The deeper reason is structural: most software on GitHub rides on one person’s attention. Roughly two-thirds of projects have just one or two maintainers, nearly half of all contributors commit exactly once, and 93% of npm packages have a single maintainer. A side project isn’t a team losing momentum — it’s one person who ran out of evenings. Add that 68% of developers write code outside of work as a hobby, and the fuel source is obvious: the graveyard is filled by real builders whose projects lost, quietly, to time — not to talent.

A repo doesn’t die because the code stopped working. It dies because one person ran out of weekends.

The reframe“Abandoned” isn’t the same as “worthless”

Here’s the number that changes the story. In that same study of abandoned projects, 41% were later revived — picked back up by someone new who wanted them to keep living. In open source, that someone is a volunteer. In every other market, that someone is a buyer.

Because what makes a project dead to you has almost nothing to do with its value to someone else. You lost interest; they’ve been looking for exactly this. You ran out of time; they have a free weekend and a plan. When a buyer looks at a shelved repo, they don’t see your abandoned motivation — they see the months of work they get to skip: working code, a validated idea, and a running start on the blank page that stops most projects before line one. That head start is the entire product. It’s why people pay real money for things their previous owner gave up on.

The testSellable, or genuinely dead?

Not every repo in the graveyard is worth listing — but the bar is lower than most builders think. A dormant project is very likely sellable if:

• It runs. A stranger can clone it, follow the README, and watch it do the thing.
• It solves a real, nameable problem — not “a to-do app,” but “recurring invoicing for freelance designers.”
• It has something real attached — a handful of users, a little revenue, an email list, some search traffic, even a domain with backlinks.
• The code is clean enough to hand off — a dependency manifest, some structure, and no secrets left in the history.
• You actually own it — original or permissively-licensed work, with no employer able to claim it.

What’s genuinely dead? A tutorial clone with nothing of your own in it, a build welded to a framework nobody uses anymore, or an idea with a fatal legal or technical wall. Even then, a clean, working starter can sell as a template. And notice what’s not on the list: profitability. Revenue raises the price, but a working, zero-revenue project still sells as a head start — the same reason starter sites and templates change hands every day.

The numberSo what’s a dormant repo actually worth?

It depends on what’s attached to the code, and the ranges are wide. A clean starter or template with no traction sells at the low end — often a few hundred dollars — but people genuinely pay for a polished head start. Add users, an audience, or search traffic and it’s priced on that momentum. And revenue changes the math entirely: recurring-revenue software trades on a multiple of profit — typically in the low single digits of annual earnings — while one-time or ad-based projects sit lower.

Be honest with yourself: most graveyard repos land at the low end of that spread. But “low” still beats the alternative, which is $0 and a project quietly rotting behind a git push you’re never going to make. The worst outcome for a shelved build isn’t a small sale — it’s the sale that never happens because you assumed it was worthless and let it sit.

Don’t let it rot behind a push you’ll never make.
— The Vertos team