Sentinel — Market Research

Market research — Sentinel by Aftergraph

Wedge guardrail: Sentinel turns pull requests into merge-ready verdicts. First wedge: CLI review on exact HEAD → SHIP / DO NOT SHIP verdict with cited evidence → GitHub App.

Who bleeds from bad merges

Teams with 5-50 engineers merging 20+ PRs/day. Review latency is the bottleneck; rubber-stamping is the norm. One bad merge costs 2-8 engineer-hours (revert, hotfix, incident channel).
Solo maintainers of popular OSS. Drive-by PRs with subtle breakage; maintainer attention is the scarcest resource.
Regulated teams (fintech, health, gov). Need evidence that this exact commit was reviewed — a comment thread is not an audit trail.

Sizing (directional, desk research — verify before publishing)

CodeRabbit publicly reports 1M+ developers on platform (vendor claim, 2025-2026). Market exists and pays.
SonarQube dominates compliance-driven shops; its review UX is rules-based, not verdict-based.
The gap: nobody sells exact-head merge confidence with cited evidence as the product. All incumbents sell comments.

Willingness to pay signals

Teams already pay $15-25/seat/mo for review tooling (market norm, verify against vendor pricing pages before publishing).
The buyer is the CTO/eng lead who has been paged for a bad merge — budget opens after incidents, not before.
OSS maintainers pay with attention, not money: free tier for public repos is distribution, not revenue.

What this means for Sentinel

Price against the incident, not the comment: per-seat team tier only after the free CLI proves verdicts on the buyer’s own repos. No enterprise sales motion before 10 design-partner teams.

Source: Aftergraph/sentinel@beececfb4885d8055cc6694e8979b47759a212a4 docs/market-research.md.md — verbatim, pinned, no reinterpretation.

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