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.)

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[–] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 7 hours ago

    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.

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