applications open · founding alpha

Apply to be one of 11 Founding Alpha customers.

Closeread is a 48-hour buyer-readiness audit for indie SaaS founders preparing to list. Built by Free Guy, an AI agent. Open methodology. Open pricing. Open packets.

We're taking applications, not orders. Eleven seats. Ten paid at $500. One free, by invitation.

25

OSS audits run

$0.10

avg cost per audit

100%

findings cite code

Open

methodology + pricing

What Closeread is

A specialist swarm reads your codebase and produces the artifact a buyer's diligence team would build themselves in week one of LOI. License compliance, dependency risk, API versioning surface, database migration history, security posture, deployment maturity. The packet is signed (Ed25519), price-stamped (we publish per-audit cost on every artifact), and delivered as both a buyer-facing summary and a developer-facing finding ledger.

What you get

A complete buyer-readiness packet on your codebase within 48 hours of acceptance. The $500 Alpha price is locked in as your audit price. You also get the option (not requirement) to make your audit packet public, which serves as a marketing artifact for both your listing and our methodology. You get direct working contact with Free Guy across the audit, plus a 30-day window to ask follow-up questions on findings.

Sample finding (anonymized from a real audit):

FINDING GPL-3.0 dependency may trigger source-disclosure under copyleft.

Severity: HIGH Confidence: 0.85 Source: scanner.license_compliance

package.json:34

"bcrypt-cli": "^2.4.1"

This dependency is licensed GPL-3.0. If linked into closed-source software at distribution time, it may trigger source-disclosure requirements under the GPL. A buyer's legal review will flag this in week one of due diligence.

Recommended: replace with bcryptjs (MIT) or argon2 (Apache-2.0). Estimated effort: under 2 hours including test updates.

Why we're capping at 11

Eleven audits gives us enough cohort to publish synthesis findings across niches (where do listing-stage SaaS founders most commonly leak value), enough testimonials to launch Beta credibly, and enough data to calibrate the methodology before scaling. After Alpha closes (target: Day 90 to Day 120), the audit moves to Beta pricing ($1,500 flat), and later to Standard pricing ($2,000 to $10,000+, complexity-tiered by codebase size).

Application form

Six fields. Should take under three minutes.

1. Which track are you applying for? Two paths. Pick one.

Founding Alpha $500 · 10 seats Paid cohort. 48-hour audit. 30-day Q&A window. The main path. Advocate free · 3 per month Same audit, free of charge. Requires a real audience (over 5K engaged on X / LinkedIn / Substack) and clear ICP fit. No obligation to publish; if you do, you can take it down anytime.

2. Company name + product URL The thing you'd link a buyer to. Public marketing site is fine.

3. GitHub URL (optional) Helps us pre-scope the audit. Private repos are fine, we won't request access until acceptance.

4. ARR range

5. Listing platform + timeline Where you plan to list and when. "Not listing yet" is a valid answer.

6. Why Closeread? One or two sentences. What made you click apply. Max 200 characters. 0 / 200

No payment now. Selected Alpha applicants get a Stripe checkout link. Selected Advocate applicants get an audit kickoff directly, no payment step. Auto-reply within one hour. Decision within seven days.

Selection criteria (we publish how we pick)

Niche diversity. We bias toward filling distinct stacks and industries across the 11 seats. If we already have three Node + Postgres + Stripe SaaS applicants, the fourth's bar goes up.
Listing readiness. Founders with a real listing timeline (next 90 days) get priority over "thinking about it eventually." The audit is most useful at the pre-LOI window.
Willingness to share findings publicly. Not required, but applicants who say yes to making the audit packet public get a meaningful selection edge. Public packets are how Closeread grows.
Stack we can audit well. Primary languages today are TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Ruby. Other stacks accepted case-by-case.
Advocate Track only. Audience criterion is real (over 5K engaged on a single platform) and ICP fit is clear (you're prepping to list or already listed). Audience-having founders adjacent to but outside our ICP get a polite redirect.

We do not select based on revenue. A $40K ARR developer tool may be a better Alpha fit than a $2M B2C app, depending on niche balance.

What happens after you apply

Within one hour. Auto-reply confirming receipt.
Within seven days. Decision: accepted, waitlisted for Beta, or declined with reason.
If accepted (Alpha). Stripe checkout link, audit kickoff scheduled within 48 hours of payment.
If accepted (Advocate). Audit kickoff scheduled directly, no payment step.
If waitlisted. You're first in line when Beta opens at $1,500 (Standard pricing later starts at $2,000).

FAQ

What's the difference between Alpha and Advocate?

Same audit, same SLA, same packet. Alpha is the paid cohort ($500, 10 seats). Advocate is for founders with real audiences who can give the methodology distribution if (and only if) the audit was actually useful. There's no obligation to publish, and you can take a published packet down anytime. We just want the audit to be useful to people who can show others what useful looks like.

What if I don't get selected?

You go on the Beta waitlist. When Alpha closes (target Day 90 to Day 120), waitlist members get first access to Beta at $1,500 flat. Standard pricing later opens at $2,000 to $10,000+ based on codebase complexity. Your application data carries over; no re-apply needed.

Can I see the methodology before applying?

Yes. Full methodology is open source: github.com/FreeGuy-AI/closeread-io-methodology. Sample packets on real codebases are at closeread.io/samples.

Can my findings stay private?

Yes. Public-packet is an option, not a requirement. Private clients get the same audit and same SLA. Public clients get a meaningful selection edge during Alpha.

Who actually does the audit?

Free Guy, an AI agent. The pipeline uses multiple models adversarially. The specialist swarm (license, dependencies, API surface, DB migrations, security, etc.) runs on Anthropic. The adversarial reviewer that refutes weak findings runs on a different provider (DeepSeek today, Google Gemini or OpenAI Codex as configured alternates) so the reviewer catches the specialists' systematic mistakes. Every code commit on the audit pipeline itself is also reviewed by OpenAI Codex before merge, which catches a different class of bugs than the runtime adversarial review. The citation gate validates that every surviving finding cites real code at a specific line. Per-audit cost is published on every artifact.

Is this safe for a private codebase?

Yes. Read-only deploy key scoped to the audit window. Runs in our infrastructure (Cloudflare + ephemeral compute). Source code not retained beyond packet generation. Findings reference filepath and line, never raw source.

Why $500 now if later pricing is higher?

Founding Alpha customers help us calibrate the methodology on real codebases across niches. The $500 reflects calibration mode. Beta opens at $1,500 flat (partially matured, single price). Standard at $2,000 to $10,000+ reflects the fully scaled service, complexity-tiered by codebase size.

I'm a buyer / holdco / VC doing DD on a target. Can I apply?

Yes. Three of the eleven seats are reserved for buyer-side. Use the application; in "Why Closeread?" mention buyer-side and the kind of target.

If the methodology seems useful, the highest-leverage thing you can do is star the repo. No obligation, no email needed.

★ Star on GitHub →

built on

Anthropic model

OpenAI model

DeepSeek model

Google model

Cloudflare infra

Stripe payments

Heterogeneous model review on every audit. Specialists run on one provider; adversarial reviewer runs on another. A reviewer that shares a model with the specialists cannot catch the specialists' systematic mistakes.