The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Marketing decision · 2026
Upstash bets a free Google-Trends-for-HN tool proves Redis Search on 45M posts
Upstash indexed 18 years of Hacker News into Redis Search, shipped a free trend-charting site that hit the front page, and let every query be the demo.
Upstash
What the business is
Hacker News Trends — a free web tool that plots how often any term appears across 18 years of HN posts and comments, powered entirely by Upstash Redis Search.
How it started
Upstash, the serverless Redis platform, wanted Redis Search to be tried rather than benchmarked. Engineers pulled the full HN archive (monthly Parquet dumps on HuggingFace), ingested it into one Redis index, and wrapped it in a small Next.js UI — a 'Google Trends for Hacker News'.
What happened
Released to Hacker News on 2026-06-25: 822 points, 156 comments. Trend lines for any term, multi-term comparison, and drill-in to the actual posts behind a spike; the MIT-licensed repo ships a one-click Vercel deploy so anyone can run the demo against their own Upstash account.
How it ended up
As of 2026-09-02 the site is free and running, doing developer acquisition by demonstration: every search is a live, re-runnable proof of Redis Search over 45M documents, mirroring the company's earlier Context7 docs-MCP play.
Background
Benchmarks are cheap and everyone has them; being used is what sells infrastructure. Upstash, the serverless Redis platform, took a different route to showcase its Redis Search product: index the whole of Hacker News — roughly 45 million posts and comments across 18 years — and publish a free site where anyone can chart how any term trends over time.
The architecture is the pitch. There is no separate search engine: the HN archive is ingested into a single Upstash Redis instance, one index is defined, and every full-text search or per-month trend line is a single @upstash/redis call. A thin Next.js app on Vercel wraps it, and the code is MIT-licensed with a one-click deploy — so any developer can reproduce the whole thing on their own account.
Posted to Hacker News on 2026-06-25, the 'Google Trends for Hacker News' tool drew 822 points and 156 comments, and the site remains free to use. The outcome is not revenue — it is developer acquisition: the demo literally is the benchmark, and developers who run the code are already Upstash spin-ups.
What has to be true
- A tool the community genuinely uses outlasts an ad: HN's own audience spent 156 comments filing feature requests, bug reports and comparisons — engagement a landing page could not buy.
- The working demo out-argues any whitepaper: 45M records searched in real time is a claim anyone can re-run, and the speed of the tool is the benchmark itself.
- The deploy button is the funnel: developers who want the same tool one-click a Vercel app that requires UPSTASH_REDIS credentials, converting curiosity into a trial without a sales call.
What can be applied
For a developer tool, the best marketing asset is the tool itself: build something the community actually wants, run it on your own product, and the demo ends up doing the selling.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02, Hacker News Trends runs free at hackernewstrends.com, backed by the MIT-licensed upstash/hacker-trends repo (45 commits). Upstash has not disclosed signup numbers, but the move repeats a playbook from 2025: open-sourcing a genuinely useful HN-facing tool (then the Context7 docs MCP server, which hit 20.9k GitHub stars in a quarter) as goodwill-driven lead generation. Whether this second wedge converts at the same rate is not public, but the tool itself is still live three months after launch.
Sources
- Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
- upstash/hacker-trends — Search over 45M Hacker News posts and comments, powered by Upstash Redis Search
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