axle · adoption signals (pre-launch)
Early adopters & signals
axle is 30 days old. We don't have fake testimonials. We're telling you exactly what real adoption signals we have so you can calibrate whether axle is the right stage of product for your situation. If you need “1,000 teams trust us,” we're not there yet — come back in six months, or look at axe DevTools / Tenon.io.
What we can measure today
VS Code installs
7
asafamos.axle-a11y · Microsoft Marketplace
VS Code rating
5.0 ★
1 review · weighted 4.50
GitHub stars (axle-action)
5
organic — no promotion yet
npm downloads (axle-mcp)
127
first 24h post-publish · mix of mirror crawlers + real installs
Distribution surfaces shipped
12
GH Action · CLI · 3 hosting plugins · WP · VSCode · Storybook · MCP · GPT · integrations
Paid customers
0
We haven't started serious outbound yet. First cold-email batch this week.
Where the early users come from
We tracked source attribution for the first 30 days. Honest breakdown — no spin:
- GitHub Marketplace search— the largest source by volume. People search “accessibility CI” on the GitHub Marketplace and the axle-action listing surfaces. 4 of the 5 stars on the action repo came in via this path with zero outbound effort.
- npm registry crawlers + mirror traffic— most of the published-package download counts are not real human eyes. The 127 first-day downloads for axle-mcp are largely npm's own crawlers + CI systems testing the package. Treat npm downloads as “not zero” rather than “real adoption.”
- VS Code Marketplace category browsing— the 7 installs and the 5★ review came in within 48 hours of publishing the extension, with no promotion. Microsoft's “Accessibility” tag is a real organic surface.
- Direct from /r/<id> certificate URLs — when someone shares an axle scan in a Slack channel or Jira ticket, the recipients land on the result page and ~15% of those page-visits convert to a free scan of their own URL. Viral primitive, real signal.
The one real review we have so far
★★★★★
VS Code Marketplace, 5/5, weighted rating 4.50. The reviewer chose not to leave a name or comment — only the star rating. We're listing it as-is rather than dressing it up as a testimonial.
What we're looking for from the next 30 days
- 3-5 paying customers on the Team or Business tier — to validate the pricing thesis and to put real names + use cases here.
- 1 case study with an accessibility consultant or agency — the highest-LTV segment. Adrian Roselli, Funka, TPGi, AnySurfer, Hassell Inclusion are the cold-outreach targets this week.
- 5+ public adopters who let us list them— even free-tier users running the GitHub Action on a real repo counts. If you're willing to be named here, mail us; we'll do a 30-min audit of your CI setup as a thank-you.