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Alternatives

Products that do what API monitoring for solopreneurs and indie hackers does

I built this after one too many 3 AM wake-ups due to API outages. Existing solutions felt overpriced and overcomplicated for my small-scale needs. Key features: Simple, GitHub-inspired dashboard Free tier: 5-minute checks, email alerts, 30-day retention Premium tier: 1-minute checks, SMS alerts, unlimited retention Significantly more affordable than enterprise solutions Tech stack: Next.js frontend, Node.js backend, MongoDB, Stripe for payments. This is my attempt to solve the "sleep vs. downtime" dilemma for fellow indie hackers. I'd appreciate any feedback or feature suggestions. What's…

  1. 1

    Modern API monitoring for indie hackers & small teams

    Feb 2026

  2. 2AA

    G’day Hacker News, I’m Simon Gurcke, the sole founder of Apitally (https://apitally.io). I’m building a simple API monitoring and analytics tool for Python / Node.js apps. It helps users understand API usage and performance, spot issues early and troubleshoot effectively when something goes wrong. Features include: - Dashboards: Provide insights into API traffic, errors, performance and consumers. - Request logging: Opt-in and highly configurable in terms of what data is logged. Users can drill down from aggregated metrics to individual requests (proven to be super helpful…

    2025 · apitally.io

  3. 3SL

    So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)

    2011

  4. 4MW
  5. 5IM

    TLDR: I made a public only web analytics without signup. Stores views and visitors for 10 days before deleting data. Exactly 25 days ago today I posted here, proud of my new web analytics. The response was mixed and my post even got flagged (understandable). It was my first real launch and I actually made a sale just a day later of 49$(!). Back then my project was pay once, keep forever. Since then I have sadly went over to the dark side (subscription based). Anyways, I never went back to look at the post after the first two hours, turns out I got a lot of answers. Most answers was something…

    2024 · indielytics.link

  6. 6IT

    After months of using Google Analytics I realized only about 50% of people accepted my cookie-popup. I had months of incorrect data for my website. I started looking for alternatives and eventually found Plausible, which is great (and open-source). Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on, it was just a hobby project. Eventually I started making my own web analytics. Which actually isn't that hard. It took me about a month of working on my spare time every now and then. Being GDPR compliant basically means to…

    2024

  7. 7IB

    Hi everyone, I've been working on a side project over quarantine called Usage.ai and I finally feel comfortable enough to launch it. We're a service that plugs directly into AWS, automatically finds savings, and applies those savings at the press of a confirmation button all without ever needing to go to an AWS console. I'd love to get HN's thoughts on it! Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/2a6f1c8e4c214914a1cdd88c6fdec4ac Link: https://www.usage.ai/

    2020

  8. 8IM

    I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…

    2020

  9. 9SH

    website: dashboard.io I've been thinking about this idea for a while now and finally got around to building the prototype this weekend. The idea is that you'd drop my JS snippet on your site and I'd start building the "AARRR" table (which I'm actually building this week but imagine slide 4: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version). Basically, the system will build that table out for you and then show you how your startup stacks up against others in your space. To be clear, I'll never share your data with anyone. So, if you're a "hosting" company, I'd…

    2011

  10. 10WP

    A couple of months back, I had come across this promising-looking app on github - a website uptime monitoring service[1] built with Node.js, MongoDB, and Bootstrap, so I had whipped up a DO droplet[2], registered a (free) .tk domain[3] and after a weekend of messing about (mainly via ssh), had created a (stock) working service (and then promptly forgotten about it): http://monitup.tk:8082/dashboard/checks Turned out to be a lot better than I had expected! Now, while there are many such (free and paid) services available out there, I do think one more can't hurt,…

    2016

  11. 11IM

    Hello I'm Jack, I was previously a Site Reliability Engineer and i've been working on monitro.dev which makes log monitoring simple for individuals or small teams. It allows you to easily forward any logs to multiple channels such as Slack, Discord & Telegram. The events are also viewable though the admin dashboard and are easily filterable. Currently there is only an NPM package with javascript / typescript support but i have plans to expand this to other languages such as Python, Rust etc. The package has many options, one of them is forwarding any uncaught exception and as an event…

    2024 · monitro.dev

  12. 12AB

    Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…

    2022

  13. 13HM

    One year ago, I downloaded the news.arc code and decided that I would teach myself programming by building a better aggregator. At that time, I had some rudimentary HTML knowledge, and little FORTRAN under my belt. I knew that I wanted an aggregator that could support a wide range of submissions, and one that could scale without losing quality for the user. Hubski is what I have to show for my time and effort. The easiest way to describe Hubski is to say that it uses a commenting system akin to HN or Reddit, but uses a sharing scheme like Twitter. You have a personal feed comprised of the…

    2011

  14. 14UC

    Hi HN, https://companies.bx.tc My colleague and I put together this tool for easily searching UK company data. We run a few server side batches daily to extract data from various government sources before linking it all together in (what is now) a fairly large database. We're also using this project as a way to test out a new JS UI library we built (similar to Vue, but a bit faster) to see how it stands up in a real project. We'd love to hear your feedback and any ideas you have for how we can improve the dashboard! Thanks :)

    2020

  15. 15IM

    Hi Everyone, I've been working on FastMonitor.io solo for about a year now. FastMonitor monitors how fast your site is, and alerts you if it gets slower. Wanted to show it to you guys and get some feedback. Back Story: I built the basic tool kit for my previous startup - we were doing SEO and had very slow page speed across a wide variety of pages, so I ran lighthouse on an instance every day and put the results in the database and on a chart. This allowed us to chart our progress and celebrate when our pages got faster, or roll back / find the problem when things got slower. Feedback:…

    2024 · fastmonitor.io

  16. 16UB

    A few months ago, i was looking for a simple uptime monitor service to monitor my websites, but i wanted some extra features that i couldn't find anywhere. These aren't wild features, but oddly enough couldn't find a service that was easy to setup, cheap, and that could do simple uptime mointoring for databases (sql & mongodb), docker containers, rabbitmq queues and os memory/cpu. It's only when i was almost done that i realized uptime monitoring services had become something of mania in the indiehacker/solopreneur world. Anyways, hoping it can provide value to some of you.…

    2023 · uptimefunk.com

  17. 17BT

    It's free servers monitoring and centralized cloud management app. We're hoping to lunch anytime soon. What do you think? Thanks.

    2013 · cloudiff.com

  18. 18EC

    We launched an early version of our uptime monitoring service Erlywarn to the public this week. http://erlywarn.com The project was scratching an itch that monitoring services would only alert you if your site went down and not if they started responding slowly or erratically. So we built Erlywarn to keep track of the response times and allow it to send notifications if your site responds unusually, as this is often an early warning sign that something is starting to go wrong. It's only been 2 weeks from conception to this, so feedback would be most welcome, especially: Would you consider…

    2011

  19. 19MF

    I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!

    2018

  20. 20ID

    Frustrated by the complexity and resource drain of multi service monitoring stacks, I built Simon. I wanted a single, lightweight dashboard to replace the heavy stack and the constant need for an SSH client for routine tasks. The result is a resource efficient dashboard in a single Rust binary, just a couple of megabytes in size. Its support for various architectures on Linux also makes it ideal for embedded systems and lightweight SBCs. It integrates: Comprehensive Monitoring: Realtime and historical metrics for the host system and Docker containers (CPU, memory, disk usage, and network…

    Nov 2025 · github.com

  21. 21

    Couldn't afford attendance software, so I built it free.

    25d ago · clockedlive.com

  22. 22IB

    Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…

    2024

  23. 23ET

    Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…

    2025 · playmatic.ai

  24. 24VW

    We've been working on Verelo website monitoring for just over six months now. Our project was created out of frustrations with existing monitoring tools while working in the DevOps team at our past employer. We consider ourselves different to what's out there today for a few reasons: - Our main goal is to provide a monitoring service which can truly help you meet and prove your SLA. This means a few critical enhancements from what's out there today. - We provide sub-minute checks. You can use us to check as regularly as every 5 seconds (for paid accounts, free beta accounts can only do 60…

    2012

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