It is with regret I have taken the difficult decision to close down CritiMon for the foreseeable future with immediate affect.

Unfortunately CritiMon hasn't been the success I'd been hoping for. I really thought that there was demand for a simplisting, affordable any stack crash monitoring platform. I still believe this to be the case but maybe I'm wrong or maybe I've gone about it the wrong way, I'm not sure.

We got some great feedback on the landing page of CritiMon from the great community over at IndieHackers but although the feedback I got was generally the landing page isn't good, and got some great advice and then overtime I started getting mostly positive feedback, but somehow it wasn't enough to get anyone to sign up and make use of the service. I got feedback on the landing page from a design perspective but got pretty much no feedback on the service itself so it left me stuck to know what to do, was it fundamentally flawed, was it just missing a particular component I had no idea?

Since CritiMon was released in May 2019 its had plenty hits but to no avail. All CritiMon got was two signups, they signed up and immediately left with no app registrations nothing, they were contacted for feedback but none was provided so again was at a loss as to why.

This has thefore led me to the difficult decision that CritiMon is no more. I've ploughed a fair amount of money on CritiMon from servers, to monitoring, to advertising all to no avail.

Therefore, starting immediately, although CritiMon domain will remain active (I'm going to continue using it for my own projects), the landing page, pricing and sign up pages will be redirected to a placeholder page.

The source code for the official libraries will be removed from my GitHub repository and anyone that did sign up, your account information will be removed from our database.

What's next for CritiMon

Although I'm shutting it down, I'm not done with CritiMon. At some point I will resurrect it however it might not be under the name CritiMon as it may get re-branded and redesigned, not fully decided the next steps yet.

In the meantime I need a bit of a break from CritiMon, I've plunged a lot of time and effort into it so need to have a break from it for a while and try something new. I've recently started learning ReactJS and so far really liking it, so there's a chance when I re-do CritiMon it will be in React. Only the frontend needs to be re-written I believe, I believe the backend processing is working as expected.

What's next?

There's a couple of little project I've got lined up in the meantime. First is an existing project I have on GitHub. Its my Android MySQL Connector. The plan for this is to update it to show you how to use the library, but also see whether or not I can get it work with MySQL 8. Unfortunately not long after I got the library working MySQL released version 8 which completely changed the authentication mechanism and there wasn't too much documentation on how it worked. I'm hoping there is now so hopefully I can start supporting the latest versions of MySQL and MariaDB.

Another project is an on premise log management. The idea is that there's an agent that runs on a server that keeps track of your logs and ingests them into a log database. There is a PC app written using Electron that allows you to view the log data and there is a PHP API which the electron app uses to fetch the logs data from the database.

The plan is to allow a team management so environments, and logs configurations are uploaded to your account and synced between your devices and/or your team but all of your log data remains on your premises so there's no security issues with your logs being stored remotely.

If you have come across CritiMon but decided not to use it, feel free to let me know your reasons in the comments or message me directly at chris@boardiesitsolutions. All feedback is welcome, whehter its good or bad, after all everything I do is to help my fellow developers so any feedback helps to improve whatever service or product I provide.

Thanks

Chris
[email protected]