A few days ago I announced Telesink. That post was mostly a small teaser. This one is the longer explanation: what problem I am trying to solve, why I kept reaching for the wrong tools, and what I want Telesink to become.
The need
While building Telebugs, I kept wanting a live pulse of the product. New signups, purchases, license activations, onboarding completions, trial starts, renewals. Small signals, but very useful ones.
I do not mean analytics in the big dashboard sense. I do not need a funnel every time someone signs up. Sometimes I just want to see that something happened. The product is alive. People are doing things. A payment came in. A form was submitted. A webhook fired.
For a solo founder, this is weirdly motivating. It is also practical. If the feed goes silent when it should not, maybe something broke. If it gets busy, maybe something is working. I wanted one simple place to watch those events as they happen.
Messaging apps as a temporary solution
The easiest solution is always a chat app. Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams. Create a bot or webhook, send a message, done. It works, which is why I used it for years.
Telegram
Telegram is especially easy. The bot API is nice, libraries are everywhere, and I could send events in a few minutes.
But it was never built for this. Personal chats, product events, friends, bots, channels, and random notifications all end up in the same place. The boundary gets blurry quickly.
There is no real structure either. If I want to count daily purchases, I am doing it by hand. If I add more event types, the channel gets noisy. If I split them into different bots, the code and credentials get annoying.
At some point rate limits become a thing too. Also, Telegram accounts have a bot limit. It is not a serious architecture. It is a convenient hack.
Slack
Slack is more polished. At Airbrake, we used it for product events, deploys, and alerts.
It is still chat-first. It is also paid, and simple webhooks are no longer the happy path for anything more complex. Again, it works, but it is not the tool I actually want.
Discord and Microsoft Teams
Discord feels too noisy for this. Teams adds its own connector friction. I do not want product events to live inside a general-purpose conversation tool.
Broader concerns with chat apps
The bigger problem is that chat apps want attention. That is their job. Product events are different. I want to glance at them when I care, not get dragged into a notification stream all day.
There is also privacy and control. Some events may contain sensitive data. Pricing and limits can change. Terms can change. It is fine for chat, but I do not want the live pulse of my business to depend on it.
Why not full analytics platforms
Tools like PostHog, Amplitude, and Mixpanel are great at historical analysis. Funnels, cohorts, retention, all of that.
But I do not want to design an analytics schema just to see that a customer paid. For this use case, those tools feel too large. The real-time feed is not the center of the product. It is a side view.
Why not webhook debugging tools
Webhook.site, RequestBin, and Hookdeck are useful when debugging webhooks. I use that kind of tool when I need to inspect raw payloads.
But they are not a permanent product event feed. History disappears, the payloads are raw, and the whole experience is built around debugging, not day-to-day monitoring.
Other alternatives explored
I looked at other options too. Ntfy and Gotify are nice, but they are more notification tools than a proper web timeline.
Logs and observability tools are powerful, but they are aimed at infrastructure. Datadog is not where I want to celebrate a new signup.
LogSnag is closer to what I want, but it is not self-hostable. I want the open-source option from day one.
I found some early open-source projects, but none had the exact shape I had in mind: focused, minimal, web-based, and built around readable product events.
Vision for Telesink
The vision for Telesink is simple: an open-source, self-hostable app with a clean live feed of product events.
It does not replace analytics. It does not replace logs. It does not replace incident tools. It sits next to them and answers one small question: what is happening right now?
The events should be human-scale: signups, payments, trials, renewals, deployments, important webhooks. If something fires many times per second, it probably belongs in logs or metrics.
Telesink will be free to self-host. I also plan to offer a paid hosted version, because not everyone wants to run another service.
This is the real-time event tracker I have always wanted. I will share progress here and on X at @kyrylo. Follow along if this is the kind of tool you also wish existed.
P.S. The title nods to the classic Plausible Analytics post.