I'd say my customers prefer my product because:
- They want self-hosting without the maintenance burden.
- They work in regulated or internal networks.
- They’re tired of subscription pricing.
- I build it in public and post regular updates on my social media.
- They value direct support from the creator.
P.S. I’ve personally worked for a Sentry competitor, so I know the pain points firsthand.
Could you share some examples? I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
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I really went all-in with the ONCE philosophy because it resonated with me deeply. It felt more like a passion project than cold business strategy.
Are ONCE projects getting updates? We will find a year or two?
Your model is a subscription, we just don’t get to know when you decide to have a new major version and plan pricing / spend as a result.
My model isn’t a subscription. Think about it like buying rice. You might buy it every week, but that doesn’t mean you’re “subscribed” to rice.
Even if I release a new major version, you’re free not to update. And if it’s a major version, it’s fair to expect it to be paid. After all, major updates usually bring significant improvements. For example, if you played the original DOOM, you had to pay for DOOM 2 too, even though they run on the same engine.
Granted they're not interested in taking 225 quid off you for a software licence, they're interested in taking 22 grand off Netflix for a complete edit desk.
If my app crashes and blasts hundreds of errors in seconds, does Telebugs have built-in rate limiting or backpressure? Or do I need to overprovision hardware/implement throttling myself?
With SaaS tools, spike protection is their problem. With self-hosted, I’m worried about overwhelming my own infrastructure without adding complexity.
Anyone running this in production?
Curious: for those running self-hosted error trackers in production, how do you currently handle sudden error spikes? Any clever tricks or patterns you swear by?
I do recall having to change some settings to make it really fast, but it wasn't 60/second slow.
See the "update" in this answer.
It runs on plain Rails, sets up in about 5 minutes (one command), and stays snappy even on small servers. The UI is modern, minimal, and actively maintained. I keep refining it to stay fast and clean.
The biggest difference is in philosophy. GlitchTip was built by an agency. Telebugs is a solo passion project. I’ve worked on error tracking tools professionally before, and built Telebugs to reflect how I wish those tools worked.
If you’re curious, here’s a short write-up on why I built it: https://telebugs.com/why
Happy to answer any specific questions!
Fun fact: Telebugs itself runs on SQLite3!
import sqlite3
from sentry_sdk import start_span
def execute_query(conn: sqlite3.Connection, sql: str, params: tuple = ()):
with start_span(op="db", description=sql) as span:
span.set_data("db.system", "sqlite")
cursor = conn.execute(sql, params)
return cursorDisclaimer : I know the owner :), so I may be biased. But generally I like to see more niche alternatives to the massive players in the field
I’m going to be pedantic here, but this statement is not true. I host a website on a provider that allows WordPress (PHP) along with MySQL, but
> System requirements & installation
> Campfire is packed as a Docker container image
the web host provider does not allow Docker (it runs on BSD).
I’d suggest improving the system requirements section by actually stating the system requirements. To me the mention of Docker without other details is a black box that I cannot have any intuition for.
Other than that I hope this project succeed. May be another idea is that you offer paid hosted model as well as the ONCE product. This is similar to a lot of OSS web analytics. People are happy to pay for subscription / services as long as they know they are not locked in. i.e They are happy to pay for $20 - even $2K per month due to Opex rather than Capex reason or saving the manual labour hassle. And they have the choice to move their data to ONCE product when they see fit.
All the best I hope this work out.
Thanks for the suggestion! A hosted solution could definitely be an option. That said, some people have mentioned that having an indie dev behind it can be a turn-off. I’ll keep exploring ideas that make sense, though.
Lately on the podcast I only hear about Fizzy and one other unannounced SAAS that they're putting dev energy behind, nothing about other ONCE products.
I suspect that without a critical mass of usage driving word of mouth the long tail of sales was basically nil, and long-term even fairly small products weren't looking to recoup dev costs any time soon.
keyle•3mo ago
kyrylo•3mo ago