A changelog tool that writes the entries
Most changelog software solves the publishing: a page, a feed, a widget. All useful, none of it the reason your changelog is empty. Merge & Tell starts one step earlier, at the merged pull request, and drafts the entry for you. You approve it. I built it because I had years of PRs and a changelog I updated roughly never.
The category
What a changelog tool is for
The job description is publishing: a public page of dated entries, a feed people can subscribe to, sometimes a widget inside your app, sometimes an email. The category exists because a changelog buried in a repo reaches developers with repo access and nobody else, and most of the people who care about your product are everybody else.
The tools in this category are mostly fine at that job. Some bundle it with feedback boards and roadmaps, some keep it standalone, some are a CLI that maintains a file. If you want the file, you don’t need a tool at all, you need a format and a template, and I wrote both pages for exactly that case.
The gap
The part they all skip
Every publishing tool begins at the same moment: an entry exists, typed by a person. That moment is the one that quietly stops happening when the person who would type it is also the person reviewing PRs, fixing the deploy and answering support. I know because I was that person, at jobs for years and then alone, and the changelog was always the first thing I dropped and the last thing I admitted dropping.
So the honest description of most changelog software is a nice place to put entries you are not writing. The empty state is not the tool’s fault. It is a supply problem wearing a publishing tool’s clothes.
This one
What this one does
Merge & Tell hooks the moment that already happens: the merge. A GitHub webhook fires, the diff and the PR description become raw material, and a draft entry shows up waiting for you.
- Drafts a changelog entry from each merged PR that survives the noise filter. Bot PRs, dependency bumps and tiny diffs get dropped before a draft exists, because a changelog that repeats your lockfile is worse than none.
- Publishes to a public page plus an Atom and JSON feed per account, and the feed can be embedded on sites you allow.
- Writes the social posts about the same merge while it’s there, per network, since the announcement and the entry are the same fact in two costumes.
- Nothing auto-publishes without clearing the approval rules you set. The drafts are the easy 80 percent; the edit is still yours.
The full walkthrough of how a merge becomes a post lives on the features page, and pricing is public, because a pricing page that says “book a demo” is a pricing page that says no.
Dogfood
The one I use every day
The updates page on this site is not a demo. It is this product, running on its own merges, drafting entries I then edit and approve, daily. I built the thing partly because I was always afraid of the telling part of shipping, and a robot that drafts the announcement the moment I merge leaves me nowhere to hide. As marketing strategies go, “remove my own escape hatch” is the only one I’ve stuck with.
Honesty
When you don’t need this
Pick something else if any of these fit. I’d rather lose you here than in an email three weeks in.
- You want feedback boards, voting and roadmaps in one suite. That is a different category that happens to include a changelog tab.
- You just want a tidy CHANGELOG.md in the repo. Use the template and a generator CLI; no subscription required.
- Your work doesn’t ship through GitHub pull requests. GitHub is the only forge I support today, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
- You need enterprise release communications driven from a ticket system. Also not this, at least not yet.
The entries write themselves. Almost.
You were going to merge the PR anyway.