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.
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.
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.
yeah, the matrix room approach is clean. that’s basically the notification hub I’m talking about, you just built it yourself with synapse + bridges. My selfhosted setup is quite simple and small, I would prefer avoid any overkill setup, that’s all ^^
and no argument on the fixing part. I’m not trying to get anyone debugging from a phone, that’s madness. logs on a real keyboard, every time.
the only bit I actually care about is the “fix now or leave it til morning” call when I’m away from home, plus enough context in the alert to make that call. sounds like yours already handles that fine.
so fair enough, if you’ve got synapse bridging everything you’re not the one who’d need this. realistically the target is people who’d never stand up a matrix server just for alerts. anyway thanks for spelling it out, that’s useful.
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).
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.
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.
For what it’s worth, you can explore the second hand market for cheaper Pixels + not giving money directly to Google.
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.
I don’t understand what you’re proposing that nagios/chrck_mk doesn’t already do
You need nagios then, it can check just about anything. Send alerts over just about any thing
I recommend that you look into nagios and zabbix before you get started. Both have free selfhosted open source solutions. And both are used professionally on the enterprise level so you even gain a skillset that can earn you money!
https://www.zabbix.com/download?zabbix=7.0
https://www.nagios.org/downloads/nagios-core/thanks/They do get tricky around the free app part tho.
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
