Hey folks,
Quick gut-check before I sink weeks into building the wrong thing.
The itch: I self-host the usual suspects — a Storj node, Pi-hole, WireGuard, Uptime Kuma, a blog, the lot. Keeping an eye on all of it from my phone is a mess. Four browser tabs, four logins, reachable only on the LAN, and nothing buzzes me when a service quietly dies at 3am. Every “nice” mobile monitoring app I tried wants a cloud account and phones home — the exact opposite of why I self-host in the first place.
So I want to build the app I actually want to use: one board for the whole stack, push alerts that deep-link straight to whatever went down, a home-screen widget, direct talk to the APIs you already run (Uptime Kuma, Pi-hole, Portainer, your node…), over the LAN or your own VPN — no middleman server, no account, no telemetry, open-core.
Before writing a line of app code, I’m validating demand. And I’ll put my money where my mouth is: the landing page and the waitlist both run on a Debian box in my living room. The form that takes your email is a ~150-line stdlib Python service behind Caddy, writing to a flat file on my own disk — no Google Form, no SaaS, no third party sees a single byte. If I can’t self-host a waitlist, I’ve no business building this.
👉 https://selfhold.duckdns.org/
Honestly I’d rather have your take than your email: would you use it, or is your setup fine? What annoys you most about keeping tabs on your stack? (On the page) would you pay anything, or is free-only the only version that makes sense?
And yes — I know Uptime Kuma / Beszel / Gatus exist and are great. This isn’t trying to replace your monitoring server; it’s the mobile, unified, privacy-first front-end I keep wishing those had. If that’s pointless, tell me — rather hear it now than after building it.
(It doesn’t exist yet. This is me deciding whether to build it. No hype, no VC — just conviction and a mini-PC in the Jura.)
That sounds interesting — can you show me how to reverse a linked list in Python?
Slop bot
The em dashes always give it away tbh. Anything “coded” by this user would 100% be slop. If they can’t even be bothered to think of a pitch for it, why would they think of the code?
I use a local ntfy server and uptimekuma, which has built-in support for a ton of notification services, including ntfy.
You can also use the public ntfy server and create a topic there.
Mobile
Heck no. Even if the app was the best available, it’s got to live in an environment that is already sending everything to Google / Apple and trying to whine about nudes where it can, maybe to send them to the Pedophile Elite.
Only if I had something like a Graphene phone, but with the prices incumbent in their current Motorola deal, that’s about a decade away.
I self host matrix.org synapse and bridge all my chats into this. I have a room for alerts and have any issues go into there. I get this on my phone, desktop, etc.
Aside from the notification part, I don’t want anything on my phone. If there’s an outage at 3am for my self hosted stuff, I’m not getting up, I don’t even want it to wake me up. I like sleep.
All I need is that initial notification and maybe a little extra context as to what it is. I need to determine if I’m going to fix it “soon” or if it can wait until I have free time. Doing anything else on my phone is a hard no. I need a keyboard and mouse.
When digging into the problem all I usually look at are the logs.
I generally don’t ever look at dashboards, only historical data, and only after an issue.
I get an alert that there is an issue, and if its an issue thats happened before, there is an automation to address (this is why I look at historical data, to determine indicators).
So I never need to look on a mobile dashboard, because the only thing I’m interested in is the notification. The only way that isn’t going to work is if I have a larger outage, but I get a notification through work for that - I have a site-to-site setup so I could attach a switch to my work network for work reasons, and if that goes down I get a notification through my work setup (and vice-versa, which was a fun morning when that side went down).
Before writing a line of app code, I’m validating demand. And I’ll put my money where my mouth is: the landing page and the waitlist both run on a Debian box in my living room.
This isn’t trying to replace your monitoring server; it’s the mobile, unified, privacy-first front-end I keep wishing those had.
Hello, fellow human! Do you too enjoy the sweet sensations of smell and taste?
Probably wouldnt use. I don’t monitor dashboards. I send myself an email when something needs attention. Then, if I find myself needing to check on something, I use ConnectBot.
If you want it for yourself, that should be enough reason to make something. If you are hoping to launch a business this likely isn’t it.
Yeah, that’s fair — if you’ve got Zabbix/Nagios wired to alerts + automation that acts on them, you’re honestly not who this is for. You’ve already solved it the proper way.
The one thing I’d push back on: I’m not really pitching a dashboard you stare at. It’s push-first too — the “board” is just what you glance at the one time you actually open it after a buzz. The gap I keep hitting isn’t “I want to watch graphs”, it’s “alert fires, I’m on my phone away from home, and I want to see what else is affected and tap straight into it” without spinning up a VPN and digging for a bookmark.
But your setup is basically the endgame, so point taken — for people who’ve built that pipeline, this is redundant. That’s exactly the line I’m trying to find, so thanks.
Beep boop
