We Built Release Compass — Changelog and Release Notes Without Giving Away Your Repo

Sep 23, 2026

We recently ran into a problem with one of our SaaS projects.

We didn’t want to rebuild the same things for every project:

  • release notes management
  • feature requests and bug reports
  • email notifications for users
  • a draft → review → publish workflow

So we started looking at existing SaaS products that could solve this for us.

We had a few requirements that were particularly important:

  • 🔹 a hosted changelog, so we wouldn’t have to build and maintain one ourselves
  • 🔹 ideally, the changelog should also be embeddable into the product
  • 🔹 users should be able to subscribe to release notifications by email
  • 🔹 a proper draft/review workflow instead of publishing everything automatically
  • 🔹 no need to give the service access to the entire GitHub repository
  • 🔹 a free tier that is actually useful enough to properly evaluate the product before paying
  • 🔹 multilingual support, since our users come from multiple countries

And there were a few things that weren’t strictly required, but would have been a big plus:

  • ✨ AI-generated customer-facing copy from technical changelogs
  • ✨ an API for automated release workflows
  • ✨ MCP / AI agent integration

We couldn’t find a product that checked enough of these boxes.

So we built one.

🚀 Release Compass

The basic workflow is:

CI/CD / API / MCP
↓
technical release information
↓
Draft
↓
edit or generate customer-facing copy
↓
Publish
↓
Hosted changelog
+
email notifications for subscribers

And one thing was especially important to us:

Release Compass doesn’t need access to your GitHub repository.

Your CI/CD pipeline only sends the release information you explicitly provide through the API.

We’ve been using Release Compass ourselves across two projects, and now we’re opening it up to other developers and SaaS teams.

Since the original idea, the scope has grown quite a bit. It now also includes:

  • 👥 Teams
  • 💬 Slack integration
  • 🤖 Agent Skills
  • 📦 JavaScript client package
  • ⚛️ React client package
  • ▲ Next.js client package
  • 🅰️ Angular client package
  • 🔐 SSO
  • ⏰ Scheduled publishing
  • 📡 RSS & Atom feeds
  • 🌍 Multilingual changelogs

🎁 Early users

If you’d like to try it on your own project, send us a message and we’ll give you 1 year of Pro for free.

We’re especially interested in feedback from people actually using it in their own products — what works, what’s missing, and what could be better.

👉 https://release-compass.app