Hi HN, I've been hosting my side project on AWS, like any developer who is also a hustler would. I was paying an okay price for not managing infrastructure at all. I moved everything to AWS Ligthsail after my startup credits run out. My project was not making me much money, so I financed it all by myself. Then one day, after some ignored spam AWS emails, I got a huge bill. 700% increase from previous period. WTF?? I said to myself while I logged into the dashboard to look at what the issue is. No DDOS, misconfiguration, nothing unusual. I log into the root account to look at the billing page, and I see it: RDS PostgreSQLl legacy fee ~200 EUR because I was running Postgres 13 in 2025. I was baffled. I paid monthly 25 eur (with 27% tax) for the smallest RDS instance, then I see this monster fee for something I think should cost maybe 2 EUR. I mean AWS just has to run it in a different environment. For 200 I could buy them a new server to run it for me. I thought to myself, I have a spare Raspberry Pi 3, I will just host it on that. Then my journey on self hosting started, I decided to cut ties with AWS or any cloud provider. I faced many challenges, particularly due to resource constraints with the tiny 1GB ram and slow storage. Then to solve my own problems I made Beacon, and I'm sharing it now to help others who face similar challenges.

Beacon solves a problem for self-hosters (or if you host on bare metal), IoT homelab users. It's an open-source agent that makes it easy to deploy apps and monitor devices (like Raspberry Pi) without the overhead of traditional tooling. Forget bloated stacks like Jenkins, Opensearch, Grafana, or Datadog. Beacon is a single ~15 MB Go binary that:

* Automatically deploys new releases from Git tags * Monitors endpoints, ports, and system metrics with custom commands * Forwards logs from files, Docker, and commands

Note: Beacon is currently in Beta development — APIs, configs, and features may change as it evolves. Feedback and contributions are welcome!