
Show HN: Little Warden, monitoring the tedious things about websites - thehodge
https://littlewarden.com
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thehodge
Hey HN,

Little Warden is a tool that my wife and I have been building in our spare
time.

We constantly see people who lose domains due to expiration or forget about an
SSL certificate renewal so we started building some software for that then it
expanded more and more and now it performs loads of the checks you tend to
forget about once a site is launched.

LW monitors everything and once a day sends you an email with a summary.

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justboxing
Nice idea and execution.

But at £ 15 for the least expensive plan, and no free starter plan for say,
just single domain owners, I think this might be prohibitively expensive for
most...

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thehodge
Thanks justboxing, I appreciate the feedback, at the moment I wouldn't be able
to support hundreds of clients on a free or reduced priced plan for one domain

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flachsechs
don't listen to anyone who thinks $20/month is 'prohibitively' expensive for
anyone who runs a commercial website, i.e. one that shouldn't go down over a
small oversite like domain expiration. it's not too much.

~~~
justboxing
> don't listen to anyone who thinks $20/month is 'prohibitively' expensive for
> anyone who runs a commercial website

I'm telling you from practical experience. I've helped several Indian and
Pakistani restaurants in San Francisco register domain names, get hosting and
then built their websites. These are the people that need a service like
Little Warden, cos routinely an owner would call me and say "Hey my website is
not accessible." or worse still "Someone stole my site." \-- cos they let the
card expire, or used some obscure AOL account or changed phones etc - and
someone registered their expired domain. Restaurant owners are notoriously
disorganized w.r.t. their digital / online presence.

I can also tell you from practical experience that these small business owners
don't want to spend 20$ / month = 240$ / year for guarding their site, when
the domain registration and hosting is far less than that.

At this pricing range, maybe Little Warden's target user-base is corporate /
enterprise clients, the "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies.

~~~
thehodge
Hi justboxing, thanks for your comments. I fully appreciate what you're saying
but I'd be unable to scale LW with that many customers paying < £6 a month.

Whilst I'd LOVE a bunch of clients where 5000 dollars is a rounding error,
that's not our target client.

Our target client is a small to medium business with multiple domains or a
digital agency that is responsible for (but may not control) a domain /
website.

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mabcat
When your pricing page says "10 checks per URL" etc what does it mean? I
assume it means that more things are checked as you move up the tiers but I
couldn't find any table of what things were checked at what pricepoints.

Edit: there's a problem with your payments flow. I signed up, paid, and got
another prompt to pay. I reloaded that page and saw that my card was saved, so
I hit it again and got another prompt to pay. I signed in using the email
confirmation and got a prompt to pay showing my card, which then redirected me
/subscriptions which 404s. There's an authorisation sitting on my card for a
null amount.

~~~
thehodge
Hi Mabcat,

Sorry about that I've been driving home all day, I'm going to look into that
straight away and email you.

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jazoom
Minimum £14.99/ month.

Looks like it might be a useful service for some businesses.

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QAPereo
It seems like the minimum is £6 for a single site actually, and yeah it does
seem potentially useful at some scales.

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tristor
Looks neat, but it's prohibitively expensive to use for a personal website
which doesn't generate revenue. I use CloudFlare (at $5/mo), but close to
$17/mo for this service dwarfs my hosting + CDN fees together. I'd love to see
a free or low-cost service that just checks SSL cert expiration and sends me
an email 30 days before it expires. Would be great for making sure my personal
website isn't broken without breaking the bank.

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sametmax
Doesn't your SSL provider send you said mail ?

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tristor
Yes, but that's based on their information, it's not "monitoring". Monitoring
is an external system not influenced by the others which observes and reports.
It'd be nice to be able to monitor this, although for my personal website its
not absolutely critical. Do you think your SSL provider is infallible?

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kylegalbraith
This seems like a great idea. I would be interested in detecting 404's as
well. This would need to be configurable because not all 404's you care about,
but some you likely do. Great idea none the less.

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thehodge
Hi Kyle, could you shoot me an email at dom@littlewarden.com about this, we do
detect 404 pages and pages giving 404 response codes but I'd like to know more
about your needs

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creatrixcordis
Shameless plug alert! I made something similar +/\- some features.
[https://lnkchk.com](https://lnkchk.com)

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pudo
Would love this if it also checked 404 assets and links.

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thehodge
Hi Pudo, could you shoot me an email Dom@littlewarden.com as to what you would
like and I'll look into it

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marcofloriano
I would love to see a free version for just one domain.

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thehodge
Hi Marco, we have a £60 a year version for one site, I'm sorry but we don't
have plans for a free package at the moment

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j_s
Stick to your guns on pricing, it helps keep away customers you don't want.

