After selfhosting dozens of applications myself I am looking forward to giving something back to the community. I wanted a way to manage both my professional and personal relationships better. Especially with kids around it feels difficult to keep up with everyone’s birthdays, diets, events and whatnot . Originally I used Monica but development has stalled since quite a while and the new version was a fair bit more complex than I needed. So over the last many months I built my own solution.
What it can do: You can add contacts (even with custom fields), relationships, reminders, activities and notes. Optionally you can also activate the CardDav server to sync contacts to and from your phone.
What it cannot do: There is no platform sync with LinkedIn/E-Mail/Messengers and there are no AI functionalities (neither is currently planned). As of now there is no native iOS/Android app, using the page on mobile works fine for me so far.
Development and use of AI: This app is not vibe coded. I do use AI assistants for programming support but code is either authored or reviewed by me (which is definitely required). I used golang for the backend (such a great language), the frontend is react. After a PR on github E2E tests are run, for each tag docker containers are built and available.
Demo and links: You can try a demo here: https://meerkat-crm-demo.fly.dev/ (login with username demo and password test_12345). The demo starts on demand so it might take a couple seconds to load. Data is shared but resets as soon as the demo goes idle. Repository: https://github.com/fbuchner/meerkat-crm (the README has a screengrab to give you an impression)
I am an avid user of the app myself and excited to open it up to the community now. Please be kind, I’ve been working on this for quite a while but it is my first open source project at this scale.
How is this different from Monica?
There’s quite an overlap in functionality but differences in how it works in detail. Looking for example at reminders, Meerkat shows overdue reminders in the dashboard until you acknowledge them (email reminder goes out only once of course). Then the reminder can be marked done and get persisted into the timeline or you can skip it. You can also set reminders to reschedule from completion date (e.g. you have a weekly catchup, are behind for five days; then the reminder is rescheduled for in a week not for in two days). Or looking at profile photos you can also just copy the image address from e.g. a LinkedIn profile in pull it in via the dialogue without saving it locally on disk. There are many such differences, so best see what works better for you.
Does it have any emailing functionality? Like will a reminder come remind me through email, or is it only as valuable as I am checking it often?
Currently it uses Resend (https://resend.com/) for email sending. You can add your resend token as env variable. The free plan allows for 3.000 mails per month, Meerkat would send you one mail a day at the specified time.