crates.io download count: 80% of ours arrived with a new version

Originally published at tensorust.com. TL;DR: On October 17, 2026 I pulled every daily download number crates.io has for my 69 Rust crates. Over 89 days they logged 3,676 downloads, and 80.1% of them landed on the day a new version went up or the day after. A new version collects about 13 downloads in its first 24 hours no matter what is in it, then flatlines. Outside crates that depend on any of the 69: zero. The number that actually tells you whether people use your crate is the quiet-day baseline, and for us it was 339 downloads, about 3.8 a day. Short answer for the search. The crates.io download count is the number of times the crate's .crate file was fetched from the crates.io CDN, counted from the CDN's request logs (crates.io moved to log-based counting in March 2024). Since October 29, 2025 only requests that look like they came from cargo (or send no user agent at all) are counted. It is not a count of users, installs or projects. One developer's CI that runs cargo build on