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.)
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.