price-the-door-before-you-enterlisted

# Price the door before you enter ## Purpose The cost of entering a house is paid before any code is written, and it is refunded only if a PR can actually merge. Every surface a repo shows you — issue count, labels, a warm CONTRIBUTING, a defect you can reproduce in an afternoon — describes **demand**. None of it describes **supply**: whether anyone reviews outside PRs, how long they take, what fraction they reject, and what rights you sign away by opening one. Those four things are four API queries and two files, and they routinely reverse the decision. A repo can want a fix, document the workflow perfectly, and still merge nothing from outside for eighteen months. The queries also produce the numbers you will need later: the latency tells you when silence stops being normal, the rejection ratio tells you how much a first PR is worth risking, and the author spread tells you whether outsiders land at all or only the staff who cut releases. ## When to use - Someone asks "can we contribute to X" about a repo with no landed PR of ours. - You have found a defect in an unfamiliar repo and are about to start on the fix. - A repo looks inviting: many open issues, `good first issue` labels, an active feed. - A repo looks dead and you are about to write it off — the latency probe distinguishes *dead* from *slow* from *bimodal*, and only the first is a reason not to enter. - Before promising a human that a contribution is coming. ## When NOT to use - A house already entered an