Cert Monitor

For the last few months I've been testing out the Cert Monitor MVP and using it to monitor things for a few web dev clients I have, but everything so far has just been using a free plan.

Different tiers have now been added, with the subscription plans I'm going to use going forwards. I feel like adding a price to something helps to better show its value. The free plan is still there, available to sign up without any payment details for as long as you like. But it feels more valuable when it's sat alongside paid options.

For the subscriptions I've used a basic Stripe checkout page using their Payment Links. Stripe makes it so easy to start taking payments. I simply link through to the payment link for each tier with a unique user ID in the URL parameters, and Stripe returns the payment details to my site once complete. And that's it - the monthly subscription is ready to go with three currencies to choose from.

The new pricing page with tier details if available to check out here https://certmonitor.co/pricing/

After a couple of months of late night coding sessions I'm pleased to say that the Cert Monitor MVP is now live.

There's still lots more work to do, but I'm happy to have reached this far. It's further than a lot of my side projects have got.

The idea for Cert Monitor came about when Let's Encrypt announced they were no longer supporting email notifications for expiring SSL certificates. Not all of my LE certs automatically renew, I needed something to keep on top of them. That seemed like something other people might find useful too, so that's how Cert Monitor was born. It allows easy monitoring of SSL certificates, with notifications when they break or are about to expire.

It's mainly aimed at developers, sys admins and DevOps teams (although anyone can use it). There's lots of features still to come, so I'm hoping to get some great feedback from fellow Indie Hackers to help steer the project from here.

If you want to know more the landing page is https://certmonitor.co/ and the sign up page is at https://app.certmonitor.co/register

The Cert Monitor landing page and mailing list have now been launched.

Let's Encrypt have recently announced that they're dropping their email notifications for SSL certificates that are about to expire. Even though most Let's Encrypt certificates renew automatically, I've still always appreciated getting a notification just so I can make sure. Plus I have some certificates that I have to renew manually, so those emails were always helpful.

The news that they're dropping this service means that I now need to set up my own monitoring to warn if a certificate is a few days away from expiring. And that made me think, there's probably plenty of other people in the same boat.

That's where the idea for Cert Monitor came from. Rather than having to set up your own monitoring solution for all of your certificates, you can just easily add them in Cert Monitor and continue receiving email notifications about their status.

It will include an easy-to-use web interface where URLs can be added with a few clicks. There will also be command line and API options for servers hosting multiple certificates, so they can all be added to Cert Monitor in one go.

The project is currently in its early stages. I'd love to hear from other Indie Hackers if this sounds like something you might find useful, and what your particular use cases might be.