Analytics and monitoring decision
TrackSSL
A competent developer can build a useful SSL expiry/change monitor in ~30 hours and run it for small fleets; TrackSSL's primary defensibility is brand recognition rather than technical moat, so self-hosting a narrow replacement is practical.
Visit website↗$19/mo
$228/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$10/mo4 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All TrackSSL alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Periodically fetch certificate data for configured hosts, parse expiry/change, store status, and send alerts when thresholds are crossed
What it still won’t have
- Certificate Transparency alerting (page lists this as “Coming Soon!”)
- Polished multi-user / organizations UX and team billing flows at enterprise scale
- Built-in SMS delivery and high-volume messaging SLA
- Private/internal network monitoring with agent or VPN-based collectors
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted by big and small businesses
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted SSL monitoring service using Node.js (Express), a Postgres database, and a lightweight React UI. In scope: (1) worker that periodically fetches certificates (tls.connect/OpenSSL) and extracts fingerprint and notBefore/notAfter; (2) Postgres schema for hosts, last-known fingerprint, expiry date, and alert thresholds; (3) REST API and simple React pages to add/remove hosts and configure notification endpoints; (4) notification delivery via SMTP (SendGrid/Postmark) and outgoing webhooks/Slack; (5) detection logic for expiry window and certificate changes and queuing retries; (6) logging, retries, basic auth for the UI, Docker Compose for local deployment, health endpoint, and unit tests for core logic. Out of scope: SMS provider integration, enterprise SSO, multi-tenant billing, Certificate Transparency ingestion. Require error handling for network/TLS failures, idempotent notifications, and automated tests covering parsing, detection, and notification flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score89
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTrackSSL product page
- official pricingTrackSSL pricing
- open sourcecertimate-go/certimate
- open sourceallinssl/allinssl
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
