I built a job‑lead radar because the job boards I tried returned garbage

Description and use

The tool filters noise in job listings, estimates realistic payouts, and ranks opportunities by dollars per hour, producing a list of high‑value freelance leads.

Problem

Solo developers face a filtering problem: job boards return noisy, unfiltered listings that make it hard to find worthwhile leads.

Outcome

The tool reduces noise, estimates realistic payouts, and ranks leads by dollars per hour, yielding a concise list of high‑value freelance opportunities.

Workflow

• Scrape listings from GitHub bounties, Hacker News threads, Freelancer.com, YesWeHack, and Remotive.
• Parse each listing for a numeric value and associated keywords.
• Apply rules: require a bounty‑ish word within 60 chars, reject aggregate words, use geometric mean for ranges, ignore recency for long‑lived programs.
• Estimate effort from text and compute dollars per hour.
• Deduplicate by normalizing titles and keep the most valuable copy.
• Generate a run summary (scraped, survived, returned).

Evidence

I spent a week measuring exactly how bad the filtering is, then built a small tool around the answer.

Source

GitHub bounties. I pulled open issues labelled bounty: 4,640 of them. In the 200 most recently created, exactly 4 carried a dollar figure... Roughly two thirds of that sample came from one account.

Source

The rules that survived: Effort matters more than payout. A 5,000 dollar project that needs a 40‑hour full‑stack build is not better than a 400 dollar one that takes four hours, so every lead gets an effort estimate from its text and the ranking is dollars per hour, not dollars.

Source

It runs as a hosted Actor on Apify, so there is nothing to install and nothing to keep alive: https://apify.com/contributory_garnet_hyz/freelance-lead-radar

Source