[halftheopposite]

I’m creating an observability tool that I’m trying to make user-centric while staying developer friendly. Most of the tools for remote logging, live dashboards and alerts are either too big, too expensive, or have a “per seat” plan, and incorporate the famous “home” screen with metrics and tips you absolutely never care of. I’m also trying to stay cheap and focused on very few techs (node, Postgres, docker, react) and make it stay as a monolith.

So far I’ve put all the side projects I manage (5 of them) and it’s working great. I can follow and query the logs, the JSON payloads by path, see live metrics like number of users currently online, etc. Even if I don’t get any customers I’ll continue developing it for my own needs! Will soon be adding alerts through webhooks, slack, discord, etc.

If you want to try it out: https://app.getboringmetrics.com (no landing page yet).

Edit: just want to say that if you want to try the software but not keep it, you can create an account in under 10 seconds, send a curl request to see logs arrive in realtime, and delete your account in 5 seconds. I do not track anything and do not keep a single piece of data.

[jay-barronville]

> Even if I don’t get any customers I’ll continue developing it for my own needs!

That’s the spirit! A buddy of mine created a tool/API to solve his own problems, opened it to the public and launched it, but he got very few sign-ups, so he just continued to use it for himself. Recently, about two years later and out of nowhere (without doing anything other than the original bit of SEO he did), he started to see a bunch of sign-ups (including paid) and then started receiving feedback and support request emails from customers. Most folks would’ve just called it quits on the product at least a year ago, but he just kept using the product for his own projects and left it open to the public just in case it was helpful for anyone else. Obviously, YMMV, but good luck with this!

I’m on mobile right now, but I think I’ll give it a try when I’m back at my computer.

[halftheopposite]

That's so refreshing to hear to be honest! I've went on so many side projects hoping I would see adoption for months and was basically chasing the dream. However I've came to realize that I really take happiness in developing things sustainably over time, with small steps, and most importantly for myself and what I would like a product to look like. Lately I've even been able to onboard a friend on it using it for his own projects as well, couldn't be happier so far.

If you ever have feedback/advices, don't hesitate to reach me out on contact[at]halftheopposite.dev and I'll happily answer.