Realtime Monitor

LIVE

Watch GitHub's ID frontier advance in real-time. Each scan probes the GitHub API to find the latest account created, then recomputes the population estimate.

Current Frontier ID

286,395,847

Estimated Valid Users

~0

Growth Rate

est.

11,549/hr

New IDs per hour

New Users/Hr

est.

~9,449/hr

At 81.8% validity rate

Daily Rate

est.

~277,176/day

Extrapolated 24 hours

Scan Latency

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Run a scan to measure

Recent Discoveries

No probes yet. Hit "Manual Scan" or enable Live mode to start tracking.

Growth projections (30d, 90d, 1yr) are available on the Dashboard.

How Scanning Works

Live Mode

Automatically re-runs a scan every 30 seconds. Each scan probes the GitHub API to locate the current frontier and recompute the population estimate.

Manual Scan

Runs a single on-demand scan using the same algorithm. Useful for checking the frontier without continuous polling.

Scan Algorithm

  1. 1
    Exponential scan — Probes IDs at +1K, +2K, +4K, +8K, +16K, +32K ahead of the last known frontier until a missing account is found. Locates the boundary in just a few calls.
  2. 2
    Binary search — Narrows the exact boundary between the last valid ID and the first missing one — down to roughly 200-ID precision in about 4 calls.
  3. 3
    Fine scan — Advances forward in small +100 steps from the refined position to push the frontier as far ahead as possible before recording.

Where does the estimate come from?

1

Measure how many IDs are valid in each range

We randomly sampled IDs from 7 ranges and called GitHub's API on each one. An ID is valid if it returns a real user or org, invalid if it returns “not found”. This gives the validity rate for each range.

Range F3 (50M–100M): 2,753 valid out of 3,057 sampled = 90.1% validity
2

Scale up to the full range size

Each range spans a known number of IDs. Multiplying the range size by its validity rate gives the estimated number of real accounts in that range.

F3: 50,000,000 IDs × 90.1% = 45,027,805 real accounts
3

Add up all ranges

Ranges F1–F6 have fixed boundaries, so their counts are computed once and stay constant. Together they contribute 203,993,745 accounts.

4

Range F7 grows live

The final range starts at ID 250,000,001 and its upper bound moves forward every day. Each scan finds today's frontier, so F7 size = frontier − 250M. The 86.45% validity rate stays fixed from the original study.