This is an evolving personal collection of random tools/SaaS platforms that I’m keeping an eye on.

Email

• Plunk
  • open-source
  • self-hostable

Notification Engines

• Novu
  • Open Source, can be self hosted for free
    • https://github.com/novuhq/novu
  • Seems to be quite early in development
    • As of now, it’s v0.22.0
• Knock
  • Closed Source, Paid
  • Seems to be more mature than Novu

Finance

• Lotus
  • Meant for creating pricing plans and managing them
    • Can implement many different pricing models, e.g. usage-based, seat-based, etc
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
  • Has support for many payment providers, e.g. Stripe & Braintree
• Lago
  • Same idea as Lotus, not sure which one is better
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
• Runway Financial
  • Tool for managing company finances, expenses, plans for growth, etc
  • Whitelisted / Early-Access currently
• Mercury
• Midday
• Maybe
  • personal finance app
• Invoice Tola
• Antimetal
  • AWS Invoice Billing thing

Real-Time

• Liveblocks
• Replicache
• Convex
• Evolu

CRM

• Twenty
  • Fully open source
  • Requires 2 containers (worker & main app) & a Postgres database
  • Polished UI
  • Can build custom objects and relationships easily in their object manager

Application Monitoring

• SigNoz
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
    • Requires a bunch of services / containers to be deployed, e.g. Clickhouse
  • Looks cheap
  • All-in-one APM
    • Logs, Metrics, Exception tracking, Dashboards, etc
• qryn
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
  • All-in-one tool for a everything - logs, tracing, metrics, etc, seems to be built on top of Clickhouse
• hyperdx
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
  • All-in-one APM
  • UI seems better than SigNoz
  • Seems to be less mature than SigNoz?
• uptrace
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
  • All-in-one APM
  • Uses Clickhouse
  • Exposes Prometheus-compatible endpoints
• baselime
  • Acquired by Cloudflare
• coroot
  • All in one APM
  • Open Source
  • Relies on eBPF
  • Depends on Postgres/SQLite, Prometheus, Clickhouse

Internal Tool Builders & Workflow Engines

• Directus
  • Open Source, can be self hosted
  • Can be used as a CMS or a generic BaaS
• Windmill
  • Much more than just an internal tool builder. can build workflows / scripts / dashboards using code, etc
  • Can write scripts in go/typescript/deno/bun/php/python
  • Simple deployment architecture, requires only Postgres
  • Has many integrations in the Windmill hub

File Storage

• Cloudflare Images
  • Can automatically resize / pre-process images for serving to users
  • Removes the need of your own custom image processing pipeline
  • Cheap?

Data Analysis / Analytics

• LogSnag
  • Looks sick, but it’s bit expensive
• Clarity
  • Free analytics & heatmap
• Evidence
  • Open Source
  • Uses Markdown
  • Easily shareable / deployable SQL-based dashboards
• UTM Builder
• Rill
• Hex
• Metabase
  • Open source, easy to deploy
  • Very nice builder - easy to use by non-devs
  • Polished UI
• Superset
  • Open source, easy to deploy as well
    • Uses a worker based architecture, will deploy several containers
  • Has a lot more built in charts than Metabase, pretty sure it uses ECharts under the hood
  • Configuration was kind of confusing - you use Python code for this 🤔. will have to play around with it more to see how I feel about it
• Marimo
  • Seems like a better version of Jupyter notebook
  • Has really cool features like the embeddings visualiser
  • Can be used for making internal tools
  • Cells aren’t “linear” but instead build a graph of all the dependencies - you can add sliders / variables and when you update them, cells get automatically updated

AI

• Rerun
  • Tool for visualising data from ML models
• Luma AI
  • 3D capture scanning tool
• mlflow
  • Open Source MLOps tooling, similar to weights and biases

IDP

• Port
  • Decent free tier
  • k8s integration available
    • https://docs.getport.io/build-your-software-catalog/sync-data-to-catalog/kubernetes/

Document Management

• Papermark
  • Open Source alternative to DocSend
  • Self Hostable
    • Although, it’s “Built with Vercel Storage and Vercel Edge Functions”
      • Hopefully it’s not tightly coupled with Vercel’s infrastructure

Developer Tools

• Graphite
  • Implements a Git workflow called stacking

Databases

• Tembo
  • Postgres based
  • Comes in with many built in extensions

Backups

• pgbackweb

Video Editing

• Wide Video
  • Free online Video Editor
• Remotion
  • Make videos using code / React

Background Process Engines

• Trigger
  • Self hostable, Open Source
  • Uses Graphile as the task engine for Postgres

Mockups

• shots.so
  • Free
  • Pretty good
  • Can’t position the mocks when you drag them in, unfortunately
• rotato

Feature Flags

• OpenFeature
• Hypertune

CMS

• Keystatic
  • not exactly a CMS
  • just an admin ui for your static astro / next.js / etc apps
• Payload
  • 2.0 version is alright
    • Used it for FindAudit
    • Postgres adapter was very hit/miss
    • Hit several issues and bugs, reported a bunch of them
    • Was tricky to setup structured contextual logging
    • Would use it again for projects that aren’t as dynamic/user facing as FindAudit
  • 3.0 version will be a Next.js app which means you can integrate it into any existing Next.js app easily
    • seems to be in beta for half a year or so now

TODO Apps

• Tweek
  • simple calendar view
  • can print your schedule
  • no bs

Diagram Editors

• Monodraw
  • paid
  • macOS only
  • ascii plain text editor for diagrams