GitHub Paid Issues & Bounty Finder

Find open GitHub issues that offer bounties, cash rewards, or paid developer work and return them as clean, structured Apify dataset rows.

This Actor is designed for developers, bounty hunters, research workflows, and coding agents that need better signals than a raw GitHub keyword search.

What it does

• Searches open public GitHub issues through the official GitHub REST API
• Detects bounty, reward, paid-task, prize, and compensation signals
• Extracts reward amounts from formats such as $500, 500 USD, 300 USDT, EUR 250, 0.5 ETH, and 2k USD
• Removes weak keyword matches and optional aggregator/feed-style issues
• Deduplicates issues found by multiple search terms
• Detects assigned or possibly claimed work
• Enriches results with repository stars, primary language, archive state, fork state, and license
• Filters by reward, currency, language, stars, repository, organization, freshness, and confidence
• Sorts by actionability, reward, freshness, creation date, or comments
• Provides complete Apify input, output, and dataset schemas

Recommended Store metadata

Title: GitHub Paid Issues & Bounty Finder

Description: Find open GitHub issues offering bounties, cash rewards, or paid developer work. Filter noisy results by reward, language, repository stars, freshness, and confidence.

Quick start

The defaults work without configuration:

{}

A targeted run:

{
  "languages": ["TypeScript", "Python"],
  "minimumRewardAmount": 100,
  "rewardCurrency": "USD",
  "minimumStars": 20,
  "updatedWithinDays": 90,
  "maxResults": 50
}

Search specific repositories:

{
  "repositories": ["owner/project", "another/repo"],
  "minimumConfidence": "high",
  "maxResults": 25
}

Output

Each dataset row includes:

• issue title, number, URL, repository, and repository URL
• bounty/reward type
• minimum and maximum detected reward
• currency and whether the currency was explicit
• short reward evidence text
• detection confidence and confidence score
• actionability score
• matched signals and labels
• author, assignees, claim status, comments
• created/updated timestamps
• repository stars, primary language, license, archive/fork state
• optional issue body preview

Example

{
  "issueTitle": "Bounty: implement retry handling — $250 USD",
  "issueUrl": "https://github.com/example/project/issues/42",
  "repository": "example/project",
  "issueNumber": 42,
  "bountyType": "bounty",
  "rewardAmountMin": 250,
  "rewardAmountMax": 250,
  "rewardCurrency": "USD",
  "confidence": "high",
  "actionabilityScore": 94,
  "primaryLanguage": "TypeScript",
  "repositoryStars": 1200,
  "claimStatus": "unassigned"
}

Detection quality

The Actor uses conservative heuristics rather than returning every issue containing the word bounty.

A result becomes stronger when it has combinations of:

• bounty/reward/paid wording in the title
• bounty/reward/paid labels
• explicit payment phrases such as will pay or paid on merge
• a monetary amount close to a payment signal
• a currently open issue with recent activity

Generic planning discussions that merely mention bounties are rejected. Feed/index issues containing many bounty links can also be excluded.

confidence and actionabilityScore are discovery heuristics. They do not guarantee that the maintainer will pay. Always open the source issue and verify eligibility, requirements, claim status, and payment terms before doing work.

GitHub token

A token is optional for small runs. Add one for larger searches or many repository lookups.

The Actor only needs public read access. The githubToken input is marked as a secret in the Apify input schema and is never logged by the Actor.

GitHub applies separate and more restrictive limits to search endpoints, so authenticated runs are more reliable at higher volume.

Pricing on Apify

The simplest Pay Per Event setup is to price the synthetic event:

apify-default-dataset-item

Each qualified result is pushed once to the default dataset, so users are charged only for results you actually return. You do not need a custom event in the code.

For example, a price of $0.008 on apify-default-dataset-item means 100 returned results cost $0.80 in result-event charges, before any platform-specific rules or discounts.

Local development

npm install
npm test
npm run check
npm start

Local Actor input can be placed in the standard Apify local storage input file.

Deploy

apify login
apify push

Then run the Actor once with default input and inspect the dataset before publishing it to the Store.

Limits

• GitHub search exposes at most 1,000 results per individual search query.
• Very large runs can hit GitHub API rate limits; use a token.
• Dollar symbols without an explicit code are treated as USD for practical discovery, while rewardCurrencyExplicit remains false.
• The Actor does not claim issues, contact maintainers, submit code, or guarantee payouts.