I got tired of my GitHub profile card 429ing, so I built an alternative

Shay Manor — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:24:32 +0000

If you've used github-readme-stats on your profile (the Anurag Hazra one with 70k+ stars) you've probably seen this at least once:

Mine broke last month. Then it broke again a week later. I looked into it and found the maintainers themselves recommend self-hosting now, because the public Vercel instance gets rate-limited under traffic. Fair enough — they're a small team serving millions of requests a day for free. But "just self-host it" means spinning up Vercel, generating a PAT, configuring env vars, and maintaining it. For a readme card.

So I built gh-stats.com. Same idea, different backend, no setup.

What I actually changed

Three things, in order of how much they mattered:

1. Caching that isn't fighting GitHub's rate limits. The original caches responses, but it's still making live API calls per request under load. I'm caching aggressively on the edge and only re-fetching when the data is actually stale. For 99% of profile views, you're hitting a cache, not GitHub.

2. No PAT required. You paste your username, copy the markdown, done. The original works the same way for the public instance, but the moment you self-host (which they recommend), you're managing a token.

3. It just works on first load. No "generating..." spinner, no empty card while the API warms up.

Here's what the usage looks like:

![stats](https://gh-stats.com/api/yourusername)

That's it. Same API shape as the original, so if you're already using it, you can swap the domain and keep your existing params.

What I'm not claiming

It's not more featureful than the original. Anurag's project has years of theme contributions, Wakatime cards, gist cards, etc. I have stats cards, top-languages cards, and streaks. That's the scope right now.
It's not more trusted than the original. It's new. You should assume it might break. File an issue if it does and I'll fix it fast — right now "fast" means same day, because there are ~10 of us using it.
I'm not trying to replace github-readme-stats. I'm trying to be the thing you swap to when it's down.

What I want from you

Two things:

If you're hitting the 429 problem on your profile, try swapping the domain and tell me if it fixes it. That's the whole test.
Tell me what feature from the original you'd miss most. I'll prioritize that next. I'm keeping a public list.

That's the post. Swap the domain, break it, yell at me.

— Shay (GitHub)

DEV Community: Shay Manor

I got tired of my GitHub profile card 429ing, so I built an alternative

What I actually changed

What I'm not claiming

What I want from you