I would pay for it as an individual. Just things like going into code and spending 3 weeks reverse engineering everything is not ideal. Especially if it's something where the entire team has quit or been laid off. And lately the solution for that is just rewriting the damn thing lol.
How much we're willing to pay is a whole other question. I feel like this is the kind of thing that Cursor already does by itself but it's just not releasing a user-readable output of it.
It won't likely be a subscription thing, but one off payments per repo makes sense, and there should be some kind of satisfaction guarantee or say, charge to have the output in a human readable format.
Monorepos are also a pain. On the front end, they sometimes share design. On BE they may share databases. It would be cool to break it down into DDD-style domains if applicable or propose things like anti corruption layers. More often it's like a "pacific ocean meets atlantic ocean" kind of thing, where you can tell there's a difference in the way things are done, but it's not entirely clear where the border is. This would probably be worth a lot more.
To a much lesser extent, an architectural copilot would also make sense. On the front end, we have a lot of redundant components. Say a button might be PrimaryButton, but the same thing is GreenButton or FilledNoOutlineButton by other devs. We tried documenting this which just ended up being a waste of 1 week because nobody read the doc. It's worse with complex components like TwoButtonModal vs TwoButtonModalWithClose. And what happens is code is always built in parallel; people don't realize that the designer's new style applies to both teams so you get two people building the same components at the same time. Not a major problem, but I think this is worth a few cents every PR.
Ultimately it's hard to gauge. Like Copilot underdelivered, Cursor overdelivers, and yet both essentially do the same thing. I guess the amount we're willing to pay is just vibe-based.
I think you should check out the Light Table kickstarter[0] which originally had a similar premise to yours, and raised several hundred thousand dollars. I personally put in $50 to be in the beta, and that was almost 15 years ago.
I think you would get a lot of takers if you could make a convincing demo.
Demo yes, feel free to reach out if you'd be willing to pay as I'm slowly starting to look for beta customers. You can also ask me to be put on the waiting list. Downloadable: I think in about two months.
