// the find
DenverCoder1/custom-icon-badges
🛡 Allows users to more easily use Octicons and their own icons and logos on shields.io badges
A proxy layer on top of shields.io that lets you use Octicons, Feather Icons, and custom uploaded SVGs in your badges — things shields.io won't serve natively. It's for developers who want their README badges to use GitHub's own icon set or a company/project logo that isn't in Simple Icons.
The core idea is genuinely useful: shields.io covers 2000+ brand icons but has no Octicons and no upload path, so this fills a real gap. The upload flow is straightforward — drop an SVG, get a slug, use it immediately. Feather Icons support via `logoSource=feather` is a clean extension pattern that doesn't break existing URLs. The project is well-maintained for what it is: CI, lint, dependabot, issue templates, and 369 forks suggest it's actually used.
The self-hosting story is stuck in 2021: the deploy docs point to Heroku with a one-click button, but Heroku killed its free tier. MongoDB is the storage backend, which is fine but feels heavy for what is essentially a key-value store of SVG blobs. The React frontend is Create React App, which is unmaintained and will cause dependency headaches if anyone forks and tries to update. There's no API rate limiting or abuse protection documented — if the demo host gets hammered, everyone's badges break.