What's new
Every change, newest first.
Upswing is in beta, which means it changes often and some of it will break. This page is the record of what moved and when.
BetaYou're on v0.29.0How the numbers work ›
v0.29.0Current
A privacy policy, terms, and a job that actually throws things away.
- AddedPrivacy and Terms pages, in a footer on every screen. The privacy page says what Upswing stores, what signing in does and does not hand over, and which five companies touch any of it. The short version is that Google sign in only confirms who you are, nothing is sold to anyone, and there are no advertising cookies to decline.
- AddedA nightly job that deletes YouTube data older than thirty days. YouTube's developer terms cap how long their data can be held, and until now nothing in Upswing ever deleted anything, so a topic searched in the spring still had its video titles cached in the autumn. A channel somebody has attached is refreshed instead of deleted, so a storage rule can never quietly detach their setup.
- FixedThe guide said results are cached for six hours, which stopped being true when YouTube moved to a day. It now names both windows, and the thirty topic daily limit is written down in the app rather than only turning up when you hit it.
v0.28.0
Nobody can empty the tank on their own any more.
- AddedA limit of 30 new topics a day per person. Everyone using Upswing draws on one shared YouTube allowance, and a topic nobody has looked at today costs two searches out of a daily budget of about fifty topics for the whole app. Until now one person could spend all of it in an afternoon and leave everyone else with an app that could not look anything up.
- ImprovedIt counts topics rather than clicks. Reopening something you already looked at today, or moving between its Overview, Ideas and Titles, is free, because those come from the cache and cost nothing to serve. The limit lifts at midnight Pacific, which is when Google refills the allowance it is rationing.
- ImprovedYouTube results are now kept a day instead of six hours. The videos competing on a topic and the age of the top twenty read the same at nine in the morning as at nine at night, so refetching them four times a day was spending the scarce thing to learn nothing. Google Trends still refreshes every six hours, because that is the half that actually moves and it does not touch the YouTube allowance.
v0.27.1
The guide is easier to find and harder to trip over.
- ImprovedHow it works has moved into the sentence under the headline, instead of sitting below the two buttons where it read as a third one. It now lands where someone still working out what this is already has their eyes, and it costs no space for anyone who does not need it.
- AddedIt is also under More in the top rail, next to Score a topic, Library and History, so it is reachable from every screen rather than only from the home page and the menu under your name.
v0.26.2
A U you can actually read in a tab.
- ImprovedThe icon is a drawn U now rather than the letter lifted from the wordmark's typeface. The bowl is wider and the counter more open, which is what keeps it legible at sixteen pixels; the typographic one was set too large, so it filled in and went solid at tab size.
- FixedA version of this mark carried its right arm higher than its left to suggest a rise. Seen cold it read as a J, not a U, because that is exactly the shape a J is: short left stem, round bottom, tall right stem. Both arms are the same height now.
v0.26.1
The Beta tag stopped wearing the old logo.
- FixedThe Beta tag still had the orange to purple gradient from the mark that was just retired, so it sat next to the new wordmark shouting in three colours while the logo used one. It now uses the same tinted chip treatment as Strong, Moderate and Weak, which makes it a label rather than a second logo.
v0.26.0
A wordmark instead of a logo.
- ImprovedUpswing has a wordmark now, set in Bricolage Grotesque with the win picked out in blue. There is no symbol, and that is the decision rather than an omission: about thirty marks were drawn and none of them survived being shrunk to a favicon, which is where a mark works hardest. Bars read as cellular signal in the top rail, thin strokes turned into line icons, and a disc with a stroke through it read as a no entry sign. A letter has none of those problems.
- ImprovedThe blue appears nowhere else in the app. Green, amber and red already mean Strong, Moderate and Weak on every score, so a brand colour taken from any of them would have put the logo in a verdict's clothes. That is also why the earlier gold version was dropped: it was almost exactly the amber that means Moderate.
- RemovedThe old mark, a gradient tile with a trending arrow in it. The gradient was the default startup one and the arrow is the most used icon in analytics, so between them they said nothing that a thousand other products were not already saying.
- ImprovedThe favicon and the touch icon are the U from the same face, drawn as an outline so they never depend on the font loading. Still legible at twelve pixels.
v0.25.0
The guide is shorter, and you can find it.
- AddedA How it works link under the search box on the home page. The guide has only ever been reachable from the menu under your name, which is where people look for account settings rather than for what a number means.
- ImprovedSixteen sections down to twelve. The YouTube card and the demand and supply section were explaining the same half of the score in two places and are now one. Trending, Compare, Sponsored and the brief share a single section, since each needed a paragraph rather than a page. Freshness and the honest limits are together, because both answer how much to trust what is on screen.
- FixedSponsored was still described as living behind the three dots beside a topic. It has been in the top rail since the navigation was rebuilt.
- FixedThe brief was described as sitting on every idea card. Ideas became a list of expandable rows some time ago and the brief button is at the foot of an opened one.
v0.24.0
Ideas knows what you have made.
- AddedIdeas now reads your own channel before it writes anything. Titles has done this for a while and Ideas never did, which meant the ideas you got were the same ideas anyone else typing that topic would get. It is shown your best and worst performing uploads with what each actually did, the same raw read Titles gets rather than a summary of it.
- AddedAn idea grounded in one of your videos says which one, and what that video did against a video of the same age on your channel. Ideas that have no honest link to anything you have made carry no link and no apology, because most good openings have nothing to do with what you made before and inventing a connection would be worse than admitting there is none.
- ImprovedFive ideas instead of twelve. Twelve was a list you skimmed and abandoned. Five is a list you act on, and it leaves room for each one to show the evidence behind it.
- FixedIdeas cached on the topic alone, so the first person to ask about a topic would have served their channel's ideas to everyone else asking about it. The channel is part of the cache key now, as it already was for titles.
- FixedThe guide described Ideas as a grid of cards with artwork and a star in the corner. It has been a list of expandable rows for some time, so nearly every position in that section pointed somewhere that does not exist.
v0.23.0
The guide describes the app that exists.
- FixedThe guide still had a full section explaining how to score a list of topics, a feature removed two versions ago, with an entry in the contents pointing at it. Anyone who read it was being taught to use something that is not there.
- FixedThe Titles page was described wrongly in three separate places: the patterns were called a right hand column when they are a collapsed panel, the character count was described by an old label, and the click estimate was shown as a number after it had been changed to a ranking. All three now match the screen.
- AddedThe guide finally explains what it read off your channel, the panel showing which of your videos beat their usual and which came in under. It is the one thing in Upswing that nothing else can produce and it was the only feature the manual never mentioned.
- RemovedThe Getting around section. Six places and a search button do not need a page explaining them, and it was still describing a Watch button and a bulk scoring option that no longer exist.
- RemovedThe what's new bar. The changelog is a click away under your name for anyone who wants it.
v0.22.2
Sign in says you can use any account you like.
- ImprovedThe sign in page now says outright that any Google account will do, a burner included, and why: the channel you point Upswing at is typed in by hand and never has to match the account you signed in with. That was already true and nothing said so, which left the obvious worry unanswered.
- FixedThat same block was still promising that the topics you are watching would be kept with your account. Watching was removed two versions ago, so it was offering a feature that no longer exists.
v0.22.1
The link preview caught up with the page.
- FixedPasting an Upswing link into Slack, or finding it in Google, still showed the three feature line the home page had just dropped, demand score and all. The preview now says the same thing the page says.
v0.22.0
The home page says what this is, and ends with your work.
- ImprovedThe line under the headline now says what the app does in two sentences. It used to be three clauses that read as a riddle unless you already knew the answer.
- RemovedThe three cards at the bottom of the home page. They could not be clicked, they never changed, and they were describing the app to someone who had already signed in and opened it. Two of the three were selling the wrong things anyway: the score out of 100 is the one output any other tool can produce, and the twelve ideas had already been cut back.
- ImprovedThe home page ends with the topics you were last looking at, each carrying its verdict rather than only its number, and when you looked at it. You arrive to continue something, so that is what the space goes to now.
v0.21.0
Titles shows its working.
- AddedTitles now shows what it read off your channel: the videos that beat their usual and the ones that came in under, each with what it actually did against a video of the same age on your channel. That reading is the whole reason these suggestions are different from any other tool's, and until now it happened silently and you had to take it on faith.
- ImprovedThe title is the biggest thing on its row. It used to render at 17px next to a character counter, a score and a button, which made the thing you came for the smallest confident item on the line.
- ImprovedThe predicted click score is a ranking now rather than a number. It was Claude's guess wearing the same pill as things that were actually counted, and printing it as 82 invited the reading that somebody measured it. Strongest, Strong and Worth testing say the same thing without the false precision.
- ImprovedThe results page has a headline. It went from the topic bar straight into a list, so nothing on screen told you what you were looking at.
v0.20.0
Fewer things, and the ones left actually work.
- FixedStill climbing and cooling have never worked. Not once, on any screen, since the day they shipped. Two separate reasons: the table they read from was missing a grant, so every read and write came back denied, and the job that fills it only looked at topics on the watch list, which nobody ever added anything to. A missing velocity reading looks exactly like a topic whose first reading has not happened yet, so it never announced itself.
- ImprovedThe daily job now takes its readings from the topics people have actually searched in the last month, instead of a watch list nobody filled in. It also stopped rescoring those topics, which was a YouTube search each at a hundred units to feed alerts on a page nobody opened. It now runs entirely on video ids already in the cache: about one unit per fifty videos, no searches at all.
- RemovedWatching. Zero topics had ever been watched by anyone, so the button, the page, the daily rescore and the alert dot were machinery around an empty table.
- RemovedScore a list. Bulk scoring is an agency job and this is a tool for one person deciding what to make next.
v0.19.2
Videos sit on the demand line, where they belong.
- ImprovedEach video now sits on the Google demand line at the point it went up, rather than floating in a band above it. That is the whole reason the line is there: a video published into a spike and one published into a trough are different facts. Floating them threw that away and left the picture looking like boxes scattered over an unrelated chart.
- ImprovedVideos published on the same day stack upward, away from the line, so a cluster reads as what it is: everyone posting into the same moment of demand.
v0.19.1
The picture, fixed against a real topic.
- FixedThe overlap maths was working in the wrong units. Positions were percentages of the plot but rectangle sizes were in pixels, measured against a guessed plot width of 960. On a wide screen that guess was half the real width, so rectangles the maths thought were clear were sitting on top of each other. Everything is now in one unit and the plot is drawn at a fixed shape, so the layout holds at any width.
- FixedThe window had a two and a half month floor, which caused the very problem it was added to prevent. A launch topic puts every video inside three weeks, and forcing that into a longer window left most of the picture empty with everything crushed to one side. The floor is two weeks now.
- ImprovedTaller, with seven videos rather than nine. On a launch every video lands in the same fortnight and they have to stack, so each extra one costs a whole row of height rather than a slice of width.
v0.19.0
The topic, drawn as the videos already in it.
- AddedIdeas now opens with a picture of the topic. Each rectangle is a video already covering it, left to right is when it went up, and how big it is means how fast it is being watched. The point is to answer whether there is space left here by showing you the topic, rather than handing you a score to interpret.
- AddedWhen nothing big has gone up for a while, the stretch running up to today is marked. Only a gap that reaches today is drawn, because a quiet six weeks that closed three months ago is history rather than an opening.
- AddedGoogle demand sits behind the videos as a line, so you can see a topic where searches are climbing while nobody has published on it lately.
- ImprovedCosts nothing extra. It reads the same cached data the ideas below it are generated from, so opening the picture is a cache read rather than a new search.
- FixedArea carries the rate, not width. Drawing four times the views as four times the width would have made it look sixteen times the size, which is the oldest way to lie with a chart.
v0.18.0
A new look, and every screen in one place across the top.
- ImprovedThe sidebar is gone. Where you are now sits in a single row across the top: Titles, Ideas, Trending, Sponsored and Channel in the pill, with Compare, Score a list and Library quieter underneath. Titles is first because it is the most used thing here and it works on its own, with no idea in front of it.
- ImprovedThe old sidebar listed fourteen rows in three groups. That is an accurate map of the app and a poor answer to the question people actually arrive with, which is what do I do here. Everything is still on screen, because hiding the rest behind the avatar made the app look like it did two things.
- ImprovedNew colours throughout, light and dark. Light is warm paper rather than grey, and dark is a warm near black chosen so video thumbnails stay the brightest thing on screen. The three verdicts are lifted in dark, because the same green that reads as considered on paper reads as sludge on black.
- ImprovedAppearance moved out of the sidebar footer and onto a button beside your name, one click from any screen. The icon is a sun or a moon depending on which mode you are in, so it never tells you the wrong thing.
- ImprovedThe version number sits next to the Beta flag at the top left and opens this page. Before, both were in a corner people had to go looking for.
- ImprovedSaved is now called Library, and Watching and History sit with it under your account. The thing those three have in common is that they are yours, which is a category rather than a junk drawer.
- ImprovedThe Recent list that ran down the sidebar now lives in the search box. Press command K, or click the magnifier in the pill, and your last searches are the first thing in it.
- FixedMore was wearing the white pill that means "this is the page you are on". It is a menu, not a page, and the front page lives inside it, so opening Upswing lit up a menu and nothing else. Carrying a page now reads as weight alone, and an open menu gets a light tint instead.
- ImprovedWatching and History join Library under More. What those three have in common is that they are yours, and they were split across two menus. The account menu is now account only.
- AddedMore carries a dot when a topic you watch has moved. That count existed before but was only ever shown inside the account menu, so on a laptop nobody saw it: you would have had to click your own avatar on the off chance. The phone bar has had this dot all along.
- ImprovedCompare is a header of its own, and the quiet second row is gone. What was on it now sits under More, at the end of the same pill: Score a list, Library, and Score a topic. That last one had no name anywhere in the app. Scoring a single topic was reachable only by clicking the wordmark, which nobody reads as an instruction, and it was the most used thing here before Titles.
- ImprovedSaved is called Library on its own page now, not just in the menu. It was going by three names at once.
- AddedA release now says so. One line under the rail when the version running is not the version you last saw, with a link to this page and a dismiss that means it. Upswing is served fresh on every page load, so a new version always reached people straight away, but it never told them, and a redesigned app with no explanation leaves you working out whether you broke something.
- FixedNothing changed about how topics are read, how demand is scored, or how titles are written. Ask the same question of this version and the old one and you get the same answer. This release is the shell around them.
v0.17.0
Write titles straight from the front page.
- AddedThe search box on the front page now has two buttons: Score it, and Write titles. One field, because what you type is a topic either way, and asking which kind of search you meant before you have typed anything is a made up choice.
- ImprovedThis replaces the "Already know what you're making?" line that sat under the box. That was a muted sentence with a link in it, positioned under a filled button, which is how you put something on a page without featuring it.
- ImprovedPressing return still scores the topic, exactly as before. The new button is second in the form on purpose, because a form submits its first button on return and moving it would have quietly changed what the return key does for anyone already used to the box.
- ImprovedOn a phone the second button sits under the field at full width rather than squeezing into the bar beside the first.
- ImprovedClicking Write titles with the box empty takes you to the Titles page rather than refusing. A button labelled with somewhere to go should go there, and someone clicking it to find out what it is gets the page, its explanation and its examples. Score it still asks for a topic first, because scoring nothing is nothing.
v0.16.2
Better wording when the daily YouTube allowance runs out.
- ImprovedHitting the daily limit used to say "The YouTube API daily quota is used up. It resets at midnight Pacific." That named a limit on someone else's account and a timezone from someone else's billing, and to anyone but the person paying it read as the product being broken. It now says: Upswing has hit today's limit. It resets tonight, and the app is still in development.
- ImprovedWorth knowing even though the message no longer says it: when the limit is reached, every topic already looked at carries on working from its stored copy. Only a topic nobody has opened yet stops.
v0.16.1
The findings panel could not do what it claimed. It is gone.
- FixedYesterday's panel listing what separates your best titles from your worst has been removed. Run against four real channels it found nothing on any of them, and that was the correct answer rather than a bug: word effects on real titles land around 1.1x to 1.4x, and on a catalogue of 30 to 107 settled uploads the level luck alone reaches is 1.2x to 1.9x. Resampling one channel from 40 uploads up to 400 barely moved that, because a bigger catalogue puts more words up for testing and the two cancel out.
- ImprovedNothing about how titles are written has changed. The half that works is still running: your channel's best and worst performing real titles, with what each one actually did against your normal for a video of that age, still go to Claude on every set. Six real titles with real numbers turned out to be where the signal was.
- ImprovedThe row above the titles and the switch that rewrites the same topic without your channel both stay, so you can still compare the two for yourself.
v0.16.0
Titles now read your own catalogue.
- AddedWith a channel attached, Titles reads your own uploads as well as the topic. Every one of them already carries a title and a view count, which makes your back catalogue a record of what works on your channel that nobody had to sit down and record.
- AddedA panel showing what it found: the words that separate your videos that beat your normal from the ones that did not, whether naming an exact model helps you, and which end of your own length range pays. Every finding prints how many videos sit behind it.
- AddedA switch on the row above the titles rewrites the same topic without your channel, so you can see for yourself whether it helped rather than take the claim on faith.
- ImprovedNothing is reported until it has beaten your own catalogue with the view counts shuffled two hundred times. Testing sixty words and printing the strongest finds the luckiest word, not the best one: measured against catalogues where titles and views were unrelated on purpose, the first version of this reported a confident finding every single time, and this one finds nothing in about 94 of every 100.
- ImprovedYour own channel's uploads are read four pages deep during a Competition run instead of three, because every extra title is evidence. Two more units on a pass that spends eight hundred.
- FixedNothing here costs a call to YouTube. Titles reads the uploads Competition already stored and never fetches on its own.
v0.15.0
Titles, out from behind the topic search.
- AddedTitles is in the bottom bar on a phone. It used to be reachable only by opening the More menu, which is a strange place for the thing people come back for. Saved moved into More, since nobody opens the app to look at a list they already made.
- AddedA way into Titles straight from the front page, for the times you already know what you're making. The old front door only offered to score a topic first: search, read a score, open Ideas, open Titles. The Titles page has had its own search box all along and nothing pointed at it.
- ImprovedThe three panels on the front page lead with titles instead of closing with them. They also stopped being numbered, because they were never really steps.
- ImprovedThe line that shows when you paste an Upswing link into a message now mentions titles. It described only the topic scoring.
- FixedCompetition and History were missing from the More menu, so on a phone they existed only if you knew the URL.
v0.14.0
The numbers on Competition were wrong.
- FixedEvery figure on Competition was built on views divided by a video's age, which is its average rate across its whole life. A video has no such rate: it takes most of its views in the first fortnight and trickles afterwards. So an established channel's median collapsed toward nothing, and a three week old video measured against that collapsed median read as fifty times normal. Both ends of the page were wrong at once, in opposite directions.
- ImprovedVideos are now compared within age bands: three weeks against three weeks, two years against two years. A channel's headline figure is the median views of what it has published lately, which is a number you can check against your own analytics rather than take on faith.
- ImprovedThe median says how far back it reached to find enough videos, so it is never quoted without its window.
- FixedThe 'last 10 vs your year' figure is gone. YouTube gives a lifetime total and no history, so there is no honest way to compute a trend from it, and the old one read 297% on a channel that had not changed. A figure that cannot be derived should not be on the page.
v0.13.4
Competition, for all of your channels.
- AddedSwitch between your channels, and attach another, from the strip at the top of Competition. Attaching one used to be a one way door: the table and the route both supported several, and nothing on the page let you reach the second one.
- AddedA channel you have just switched to that has never been looked at now offers to find its competition, rather than showing an empty list with no way to start.
v0.13.3
Stop calling a subject untouched when you have nineteen videos on it.
- FixedSubjects you already cover were being listed under a heading that said you had not touched them. They get their own heading now, "Subjects you cover that pay them better", and only appear when the subject works clearly better for your competition than it does for you. Your own showing on it is the point of the row.
- ImprovedOne channel can no longer fill the breakout list. A launch week held six of eight rows, which described one news cycle rather than what is working across your competition.
- FixedA channel posting more than once a day showed "posts every 0 days".
v0.13.2
Ask about one video at a time.
- FixedGrouping videos into subjects asked for eight lists covering four hundred videos in a single reply. On a real channel that reply ran past the token limit and came back unreadable, killing the pass on its last step after all the expensive work was done. It now asks one video at a time, in batches, so the answer is small by construction and there is no limit left to hit.
- ImprovedA batch that fails costs its own videos and nothing else. The pass finishes with the rest.
v0.13.1
When a pass fails, keep what it found.
- FixedA pass that failed on the last step threw away every channel it had already found, even though the page said otherwise. The channels are written down before that step now, so a failure costs you the subject grouping rather than the whole run.
- Fixed"Claude returned a response that could not be read" covered a refusal, a reply cut off at the token limit and a mismatched shape, which want different fixes. The message now says which step and which of those it was.
- AddedRun it again, on a failed pass, so a retry does not mean finding your channel link a second time.
- FixedRaised the token ceiling on both model steps to match the ones that have been working for weeks. A reply cut off midway is indistinguishable from one that could not be read, and that is the likeliest cause of a pass dying at the end.
- FixedA channel posting slightly more often than every other day no longer reads as "posting every 1 days".
v0.13.0
Who you are actually up against.
- AddedCompetition. Paste your channel link and Upswing works out which channels answer the same questions you do, by reading what you publish on and then searching those subjects to see who else keeps ranking. Every row shows the evidence that put it there, and an X for when it got one wrong.
- AddedChannels far bigger than you are listed separately as the ceiling rather than beside you. A channel fifty times your size ranks for everything in your subject and is not something you can win against, so putting it in the same list only makes the page depressing.
- AddedWhat broke out in the last 90 days across the channels in your band, each video measured against its own channel's median rather than against yours. A small channel's real hit stops being buried under a big channel's ordinary week.
- AddedThe gap: subjects your competition wins that you have never published on, ranked by how well they pay the people already doing them, with a Score it button on every row.
- AddedIt is a public link and nothing else. No sign in, no connection to your account, and nothing to approve.
v0.12.0
Everything you have looked at, in one place.
- AddedHistory, in the sidebar. Every topic you have scored and every set of ideas and titles you have written, grouped by day, newest first. Clicking a time opens that exact set as it was written: nothing regenerates and nothing costs an API call.
- AddedA filter box on History, because after a month the list is long and you usually know roughly what you are looking for.
- FixedRecent in the sidebar now includes topics you went straight to Titles or Ideas for. Only scoring a topic used to count, so half of what you had been doing was invisible to a list claiming to be recent.
- ImprovedThe stub of a search list down the side of Saved is gone, replaced by a link to History, which does the job properly.
v0.11.2
Recent actually means recent.
- FixedThe Recent list in the sidebar now updates as you search instead of showing whatever was there when you opened the tab. It lives in the sidebar, and the sidebar wasn't being redrawn as you moved around, so it quietly fell behind. Thanks to Matt Pearce for spotting it.
- FixedTwo topics compared together were written at the same instant, so they swapped places at random between page loads. They hold their order now.
- ImprovedRounds on Ideas and Titles go back 30 instead of 8, so a set you wrote last week is still a click away. Anything past the first six folds behind a count rather than filling the row.
v0.11.1
Google is the way in again.
- FixedSigning in with an emailed link is gone for now. There was no mail sender behind it, so the link either crawled or never arrived, and a sign in that fails without saying anything is worse than one that was never offered. It comes back when there's a sender worth trusting.
v0.11.0
Tell Jon what's wrong with it.
- AddedSend feedback, in the account menu at the bottom of the sidebar. One box, no categories and no rating: the useful thing is the sentence you would actually type.
- AddedFeedback carries the page you were on and the version you were running, which is the difference between a report that can be fixed and one that can't. The box says so before you send, because collecting that quietly would be the wrong way round.
v0.10.1
A second way in, and a straight answer about why there's a door.
- AddedSign in with an emailed link, for anyone who would rather not use a Google account. No password to invent, and the link expires in an hour.
- AddedThe sign in page now says why it's asking: Upswing keeps a record of the topics you've scored and the ideas you saved, it reads nothing from your YouTube channel and can't post anything, and every topic scored costs real money in API calls.
- FixedA sign in that fails because you opened the emailed link in a different browser from the one you asked from now says so, rather than repeating an error message that explains nothing.
v0.10.0
Upswing now asks whether anyone is answering, not just whether anyone is asking.
- AddedSupply. Counting competing videos never said much: 48 videos describes both a topic three channels shipped on last week and one whose best answer is fourteen months old from a channel that moved on, and those are opposite bets. Overview now shows the median age of the top results and how many landed in the last 90 days, and says plainly when nobody is defending a topic.
- AddedDemand split by where people search. The same topic is measured against Google web search and against YouTube search. A topic people Google heavily but rarely search on YouTube is one they want to read; the reverse means video is the format they already reach for. Nothing else on the market shows this.
- AddedShow the working now lists what is already on YouTube for a topic, in the order YouTube ranks it, with each result's age, its views, and whether it is still picking up views.
- AddedUpswing records the view count of every competing video each day. YouTube returns a running total and no history at all, so this is the only way to tell a video still climbing from one that stalled. The column is empty today and fills in over the next few days.
- ImprovedThe four numbers under the score are grouped into Demand and Supply with the question each answers written above it. Two of them were always demand and two were supply, and nothing on the page said so.
- FixedTrending has not been collecting anything since it shipped. The rising searches were being saved after the response had already gone out, which the framework rejects, and the write was failing silently every time. It works now.
v0.9.1
The sidebar says what things are again.
- FixedThe sidebar is a list of named places rather than a strip of icons. A star and an eye only mean Saved and Watching once you already know, and a tooltip you have to go hunting for is no use on a first visit.
- FixedEverything the app can do has a named row in the sidebar again, grouped as Find, Make and Yours. Compare, Score a list, Sponsored, Ideas, Titles and Stats had been moved onto menus that only appear once a topic has been scored, which meant that from a cold start they may as well not have been built.
- FixedRecent searches and the Light / Dark / Auto switch are back in the sidebar rather than two clicks deep in a menu.
- ImprovedIdeas, Titles and Sponsored carry the topic you're looking at across, so picking one from the sidebar never means typing the topic again. They stay as tabs on the topic too.
- FixedThe version number and the Beta label are back in the bottom corner, and the version is still the way into this page.
- FixedThe counts are back: how many ideas you've saved, and how many watched topics have moved since you looked.
- FixedSigned out, Sign in is a button again rather than a grey line hidden behind a circle with a question mark in it.
- ImprovedThe account row at the bottom shows which account you're signed in as instead of a single letter.
v0.9.0
The whole app, cut back to three ways of moving.
- ImprovedEverything you can do to a topic now lives on the topic itself. Score something and the tabs across the top are Overview, Ideas and Titles: no retyping, nothing to go hunting for in a sidebar.
- ImprovedA result now answers before it explains. One sentence, one number, four figures, and the charts, the weights and the year sit behind Show the working. The whole thing fits on one screen.
- ImprovedThe sidebar is a narrow strip of icons and holds four things: Trends, Trending, Saved and Watching. Compare, Sponsored and Score a list moved to the three dots beside the topic, where they read as things you do rather than places you go.
- ImprovedIdeas and titles are lists now. Twelve tall cards showed six ideas on a laptop screen; a list shows all twelve, and a row opens to the angle, the gap, the competing videos and the buttons.
- ImprovedOn a phone there is a fixed bar along the bottom instead of twelve pills scrolling sideways.
- ImprovedFewer type sizes, one card style, and colour that means one thing: blue is a button, green amber and red are a number's quality, and the Upswing gradient is only ever the logo.
- FixedSign in is Google only. The email link let anyone with the address make an account, which was never the intention.
v0.8.0
Eight additions, aimed at everything the app made you do by hand.
- AddedTrending. Every topic you score makes Google hand back the searches climbing around it, and those were being thrown away. They're kept now and ranked on their own page, so there's somewhere to look before you have an idea. Nothing on it costs an API call.
- AddedAcross the year. A second Google Trends reading over 12 months, so a topic that peaks every September says so instead of looking flat in a 30 day window. It also says, plainly, that one year can't prove a season.
- AddedScore a list. Paste up to eight topics and Upswing scores them one after another, shows each as it lands, then ranks them and says which is the strongest bet and by how much.
- AddedLink the video. On any saved idea marked Done, paste the YouTube link. Upswing puts the real view count next to what it predicted, and after six videos it tells you whether the predicted score is worth trusting, including if it turns out backwards.
- AddedSearch from anywhere with ⌘K, or Ctrl K on Windows. Recent searches and every page are in the same box, so starting a search no longer means going back to the home screen.
- AddedRounds. Regenerating ideas or titles used to throw the previous set away. Every round is kept now, and opening an old one is instant and free.
- AddedShare publicly. Freezes a result at a link anyone can open without an account. They see the score and the sources, and nothing else: no search box, no generation, nothing about your history.
- ImprovedThe sidebar is grouped into Find, Make and Yours rather than one list of nine, and the first screen now says what pressing the button actually does.
v0.7.0
What it costs, on the page only you can see.
- AddedA costs panel on Stats: Claude spend this month, SerpApi searches against the free 250, YouTube quota units used today, and the average cost of one set of ideas or titles.
- AddedEvery call Upswing makes to YouTube, SerpApi and Claude is now recorded as it happens, so the figures are counted rather than guessed from how many searches ran.
v0.6.0
Knowing whether anyone is using it.
- AddedVisitor counts, through Vercel's own analytics. No cookies are used, so there is nothing to consent to and nobody is tracked between days or between sites.
- AddedA private stats page showing searches per day, which accounts are active, and the most searched topics. It is limited to specific email addresses and simply does not exist for anyone else.
v0.5.1
Clearer copy on the home screen.
- ImprovedThe line under the headline is shorter and says what you actually get: what is trending, what is coming, and what everyone else missed.
v0.5.0
Six additions, aimed at the parts of the job the app wasn't touching yet.
- AddedWatching. Press Watch on any topic and Upswing rescores it once a day, then flags it in the sidebar when it moves. The daily check uses only the free YouTube allowance, so watching costs nothing.
- AddedSponsored. When a brand has already picked the product, this finds the questions people are asking about it and the framings that already have an audience, instead of suggesting a different topic.
- AddedBrief. One page per idea holding the angle, the gap, the competing videos, the searches behind it and six title options, with a button that copies the lot as plain text for a script doc.
- AddedYour record: a chart of every score Upswing has taken for a topic. It's the only part of the app that remembers further back than 30 days, and it fills up on its own.
- AddedThumbnails on the competing videos and the winning title examples, since packaging gets judged by eye and the app was only showing words.
- AddedUpswing can be added to a phone home screen and opens without browser chrome.
v0.4.0
Upswing now tells you which version you're looking at.
- AddedA Beta label beside the name, because the app is still changing week to week and anyone you share it with should know that.
- AddedThis changelog, reachable from the version number in the sidebar and from the footer of every page.
v0.3.0
Numbers you can act on without doing arithmetic in your head.
- AddedCompare scores two topics side by side and says which is the stronger bet, so the choice no longer depends on remembering a number from the last search.
- AddedEvery Trend Score now says where it sits against your own recent searches, like “Higher than 8 of your last 10 searches”. A score on its own means very little.
- AddedSaved ideas can be marked Idea, Making or Done, and filtered by it. One button copies the whole list as plain text for a script doc.
- AddedCopy link on results and comparisons, so a search can be handed to someone else as it is.
- ImprovedMeasured numbers and Claude's estimates now look different. A solid pill was calculated from real data, a dashed outline is a prediction. Both appear in a small key on every page that uses them.
- ImprovedGenerating ideas or titles now shows real progress instead of a blank panel, including what it found: “Read 48 videos and 5 rising searches”.
- ImprovedThe phone home screen lists your actual recent searches with their scores, which previously only existed in the desktop sidebar.
v0.2.0
Every number on every screen now explains itself.
- AddedHow it works: a full guide to what each metric measures, where it comes from, how to read the combinations, and what the data can't tell you. Written for anyone, not just people who know YouTube analytics.
- ImprovedThe guide reads its own thresholds from the app's settings, so retuning the score can never leave the explanation stating old numbers.
v0.1.0
First working version.
- AddedTrend Score from 0 to 100 for any topic, built from Google Trends and YouTube, with a breakdown of each source over 7 and 30 days.
- AddedRising and top related searches, each one clickable as a fresh search.
- AddedThe idea generator: 12 video ideas aimed at gaps the top videos leave open, with competition counted from real view counts.
- AddedThe title recommender: patterns pulled from the 50 best performing videos on a topic, then new titles written in those patterns.
- AddedAccounts, saved searches, starred ideas, and Light, Dark or Auto appearance that the site remembers.
Versions start at 0 while Upswing is in beta. The middle number moves for new features, the last one for fixes.