12 ms·

Monica: Open-source personal CRM

372 points by jandeboevrie 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago
So kind of like a combination contacts+notes app?
CGamesPlay 7y ago
This comes up semi-frequently on HN. The Show HN post is here with lots of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
- dang 7y ago
  The other thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547, from last year.
Flimm 7y ago
Is anyone using this CRM? How have you benefitted from it in your personal life?
- unixhero 7y ago
  I tried it and really liked the features. So far I haven't been able to bake it into some kind of 'visit friends workflow'. And also I get this bad vibe from consulting-managing my personal relationships, it feels cold, cynical and controlling. It's not who I am. However it's not this apps' fault, but the feeling I get from trying to apply it and get some value out of putting effort into tracking personal relationships.
  - VvR-Ox 7y ago
    I feel similarly and would feel a bit awkward telling someone that I use it. On the other hand I think I have to face the fact that I am just not good at remembering a lot of tiny details - especially about people I have only met a few times or don't see very frequently. I think remembering stuff about a bunch of people is possible but when you interact with a lot it becomes more and more difficult to remember everything. Of course one could argue that in this case you maybe should "sort out" your relationships to determine who of all these people is really important to you but that feels even harder for me than using a personal CRM to have a good relationship to people that are not part of my circle of best friends. Family is another example. I didn't choose them but I have to see them once in a while and among other features recording what presents I got them and they got me would be good enough to at least not blow up some celebration because I would get the same present again or being able to connect presents to people who gave them.
- darkkindness 7y ago
  I tried running this a year ago and remember some things which stood out. But again, a year ago -- details are fuzzy, and likely outdated. pros: - The no-cost self-hosted setup was easy enough. I didn't have to jump through too many installation-debugging-hoops - Could easily customize the UI with minimal CSS edits - The app was pretty responsive in my view, and my view is that web apps are known for clunkiness - All the things you could do within the app were pretty obvious from the interface ("no manual required") cons: - Honestly, the thing that killed it for me was being required to select Male or Female for every person entered. It was ridiculous, so they probably have removed any sex/gender field by now, right? - To my knowledge it only had a web interface, so I couldn't open up and edit the data in a text editor (personal preference), for instance
anonfunction 7y ago
How do they make money or keep the service online? They don’t have any pricing and also say they don’t show ads or sell user data.
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  > They don’t have any pricing What do you mean? They literally have a link called "Pricing" at the top. It's $9 a month.
  - iNate2000 7y ago
    No link on my phone. There it is - if I turn it sideways.
blondin 7y ago
i have seen this one on trending php projects on github quite often. as a side note, the php community is quite good at coming up with cms projects. i wonder what makes the language so nice for writing content management systems in? might be interesting to learn about.
- muglug 7y ago
  It’s fairly simple, with a syntax close to JavaScript that’s easy to pick up.
  - milankragujevic 7y ago
    There are many languages that are as simple or even simpler than PHP in syntax, and if you're comparing it to JavaScript, nodejs is literally JavaScript. PHP's biggest strength is ease of deployment and popularity. Deploying a nodejs app is a nightmare, because of the fact that nodejs isn't a web-first language in the traditional sense. It's a general purpose language that can do many things, but that causes problems for, i.e. hosting multiple apps on a single server (without having to coordinate ports between them, firewall them off, and have a single nginx instance proxying to them based on domain names). PHP is simple to deploy. If you have a shared hosting, just upload files to the FTP server, and open the page in the browser. It works. If you have a root server, just `sudo apt install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-php7.3` and put the files in /var/www/html/ It's a perfect fit for web because that's the only place where it actually works. It does one thing (platform) and it does it well (from the deployment perspective). It has (had) it's warts in the years, but I don't find many things that it doesn't have compared to other scripting languages.
    - flir 7y ago
      Think you're underestimating the array functions. They might be ugly (programmers tend to prefer expressive array syntax), but their learning curve is the best of any language. So much of programming for the web is "do something to an array of stuff", and PHP makes that super-easy.
    - wolco 7y ago
BinaryIdiot 7y ago
Something like this is what I need. I have an awful memory and need something to catalog the people I meet and know. Which would probably sound a bit odd if the people found out but otherwise I wouldn't remember. My issue is ubiquity and reliability. This doesn't seem to have a mobile component and I'm not sure how reliable the service or even company is. The latter of which can come in time. It's cool, though. I've been thinking about using something like Airtable for this sort of thing.
- edraferi 7y ago
  I agree. I want something like this that: (1) is a native mobile/desktop app instead of web-first, because there’s no reason my most personal stuff should be available globally (2) stores data in a REALLY open format like JSON or YAML, because I want maximum interoperability and minimum but rot (3) synchronizes across devices using generic file sync tools like Dropbox, google drive, or One Drive, because all my other stuff is in there and they’re as secure as anything gets (4) runs anywhere without administrator privileges or special run times, because I want to be able to use it at work (5) federated the data store so I can have a single view into personal, professional and proprietary information, while storing and sharing them appropriately to the sensitivity of the data.
  - zwarag 7y ago
    What would you be ready to pay for such a software?
- w33ble 7y ago
  I’m the same and have been using it mostly just to keep track of the names of everyone’s jobs, SO, and kids. The site on mobile is usable, an app might help but isn’t required. As for your data, it lets you export everything quite easily (as JSON IIRC). And since there’s a version you can host yourself, if their service goes away, you can export and self host. It’s pretty easy to get going on a free Heroku instance too. Consider trying it out if you’re interested in a tool like this.
newscracker 7y ago
I wonder how many paid users are there for the hosted version and how the pricing was arrived at. Paying $90 a year for a personal CRM seems quite high since this is for each user. The application allows adding people, relationships, notes about people, events, contacts had with people, etc. There is no integration with any data source to pull information automatically. There is no integration with any platform or application to communicate with others. I believe the hosted application could earn a lot more to support development and maintenance at a lower price point and reaching many more people.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  It's a heavy pricetag considering other free alternatives exists. If you look at the features page, I could replicate that with Asana easily.
  - davidu 7y ago
    SaaS is another way of outsourcing IT. Personal IT or someone else's. You could replace dropbox with an FTP server, too. But most people value their time more and will just pay $90 who want this set of features.
  - modarts 7y ago
    Airtable as well
- groby_b 7y ago
  How is $90 for a hosted application expensive? You're paying somebody $7.50 each month. That's... a latte and a half for the Starbucks crowd. Even at minimum wage, you're paying somebody to do 45 minutes of work for you. And if organizing your contacts/keeping a log/finding pertinent info is significantly less than 45 minutes/month of work, may I humbly suggest you don't need a CRM? And my wild guess is the devs know that, and they know that they'll lose the casual crowd anyways. "We make it up in volume" doesn't work if the volume just kicks the tires and leaves. In my experience, what people really want when they're in that range is not something to manage your contacts - you want help with keeping a household book. (Or butler's book). And I really haven't seen an app to help there yet.
sdan 7y ago
I like the idea behind a personal CRM. Personally, however, I don't think I've come to the point in my life where I forget about people when I meet them in-person. On top of that, my biggest issue with tools like these (not bashing, really appreciate that products like these exist) is that they don't intrinsically flow with my life. Honestly Apple Contact is probably as far as I'll go (if even that... I leave a lot of calls without properly IDing them). Personally, I find filling out all the info about a person into some database takes a lot of time... which I guess overtime may save some time based on if you're really utilizing it. This is similar to photos: I am a strong privacy advocate, but Google Photos simply is a far greater product than if I were to spend 10x the time combing through photos to create animations and videos. Obviously, however, in business, a CRM is a great tool (CRM for investors for example). Which makes me think... maybe I haven't met that many people? Love the idea of the product and appreciate it exists. I think I'll stick to Apple Contacts and Twitter.
- IanCal 7y ago
  Perhaps it's just about what you're good at. I find it very hard for some reason to remember names or other details like which set of kids are with which parents, even for fairly close family. I've used anki to good effect on this kind of thing but it's not quite the right structure for looking things up. I've been meaning to try Monica because it's a structured place to store the kind of information I find myself forgetting easily and that is harder to ask again.
tempodox 7y ago
Not that I see myself needing this in the foreseeable future, but I still want to commend the structure of the offering. There's a paid tier, a free tier, and the possibility of installing the open-source software on your own host computer. I think that's a great set of choices. I wish more webware were organized like that.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  It's great that the self hosted version is fully featured. On the other hand $90/year seems way overpriced.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    $7.50/month? Seems pretty reasonable to me.
    - nebulous1 7y ago
      Not to me, but it I guess it depends on your usage. However, for something like this I don't think you want to be competing with a Netflix subscription price-wise. I would have aimed for a dollar or two a month. Admittedly this was probably their initial idea too, but things don't always work out as planned.
      - xwdv 7y ago
        What’s your yearly income?
      - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        To be frank, if your monthly value comparison for something like this is Netflix, you aren't the target demo.
        nebulous1 7y ago
        Okay, what do you want to compare it to?
rpastuszak 7y ago
Is anyone using Monica successfully? What's your experience with it? I notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people/responding to text messages earlier than in 3 days, so this seems to hit the spot for me.
ratiolat 7y ago
I've tried the self hosted version. What kind of app on android should one use? I think there's supposed to be chandler and I either did not find the app in play store or it did not work. It has been many months since I tried that though.
- jandeboevrie 7y ago
  The app which let's you browse the internet? Type in the address of your server and you should be presented with Monica. Works quite well on mobile.
  - ratiolat 7y ago
    Ah. Memory served me well, although it got the timeline wrong: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler https://github.com/monicahq/chandler It has been deprecated App is needed to avoid copypasta and inconveniences
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  The first thing I'd like to do after meeting someone is enter their name and a brief note. With the web version, this requires submitting two forms. I created a mobile app that lets you do this in one step. You just need to configure it with your API key: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twilam.monicacompanion https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twilam.mon...
ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
As in Monica Geller, right?
dejj 7y ago
I like the design statement that the text "Proudly OPEN SOURCE" is slightly off-center.
- weinzierl 7y ago
  I can't tell if you are serious or not, but it looks off to me.
eb0la 7y ago
The moment you or your friends have kids, there are a lot of infrequent interactions with people and the names (and ages) really matter. I guess the killing feature for me would be remembering names of parents if my kids schoolmates. You end up calling people "the mother of $KID" for KID in kids in classOf($my_kids).
- officemonkey 7y ago
  I have a real lo-tech solution for that. I carry a bound memorandum book (field notes or the like) in my pocket and write down the everything I know about each kid. One kid per page. Example: Julian, blonde, in same class, 3rd and 4th grade Sister: Kiera, two years younger, big hello kitty fan Mother: Monica, red hair, glasses. Dad: ??, looks like Ron Swanson. I just fill in the blanks when I learn them. By the time I'm exchanging phone numbers, I usually have the names down. Families move and friendships change, so I don't invest a lot of time memorizing details.
  - technothrasher 7y ago
    Really?? Why all the data recording? I'm not criticizing, I've just never paid that much attention to the families of my kid's friends. Get togethers just sort of naturally happen, and pertenent details of families of kids who my kid likes enough to hang out with a lot aren't that hard to remember.
    - Hackbraten 7y ago
      What may be easy for you may be hard to impossible for other people.
    - cmiles74 7y ago
      I can't remember these people's names and I am definitely trying. Even worse is when I confidently use the wrong name when I'm talking to one of these parents. Conversation immediately ceases, it's so awkward that I mostly try not to use names at all. There are some parents that I remember, I think because I see them often enough or they might be particularly unique looking (to me, anyway). There seems to be some mental bar that needs to be crossed before I can reliably recognize them, otherwise they all kind of blend together for me.
wnscooke 7y ago
It's even available on Cloudron.io too.
anotherevan 7y ago
I would be very interested in this if it can be used as a Carddav server. I run a Nextcloud instance solely as a central point for managing contacts. It syncs with my phone, alias lists for NCID and various other bits and pieces. Something that specialises in this a bit more, but will still fill in that piece would be quite attractive.
- Operyl 7y ago
  It does look like they implemented carddav earlier this year!
jcslzr 7y ago
Monica? Bitchard friend?
- pettycashstash2 7y ago
  I find your crude language repulsive. Hoping moderators will remove comment. Not only is your comment inappropriate, it bring zero value to discussion
polyterative 7y ago
Or just use notion
- random_visitor 7y ago
  That actually works really well. When I found out that Notion is completely free for students, I moved from every notes site apart from Google Keep and manage almost everything on it.
kristofferR 7y ago
I looked into Monica recently, but feel that it's way too complicated TBH. Information paralysis, too many fields you can fill with irrelevant information. The lack of mobile apps is also a massive issue - I want to look up information right before I meet someone, and remember most to note down right afterwards. For my usage the simplicity of Hippo (https://gethippo.app/ https://gethippo.app/) makes me much more likely to actively use it.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  Thanks for the link, a simple mobile app is more in line with what I'd be looking for for this use.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    Hope you use an iPhone... no Android/HTML5 app...
petr25102018 7y ago
My app is in the same space (or at least the original idea of it) but over time I really doubt it is a space to make any money in. People just don't pay for a personal software like this. I am glad to see that they have over 40,000 users (maybe not active tho) so it proves that the idea is not completely unreasonable. Maybe it just needs a little bit different approach, I don't know. I myself struggle with what to do with my own app in the space.
- edraferi 7y ago
  What’s your app? What have you tried?
  - petr25102018 7y ago
    https://contactcache.com/ https://contactcache.com/ I didn't get to monetize it as I don't have all the features yet & also I don't see a big demand for it.
madsbuch 7y ago
These types of software has, to me, some big pitfalls: 1. The administrative burden: In over for the software to have any value, the user is imposed a huge documentation burden all the time. 2. Privacy: This is probably the worst. Imagine that you write down intimate details of your friends of family, and the platform has a leak. Also, the subjects have _no_ data control what so ever. In the privacy regard this is probably worst in class.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 713233eb 7y ago
  Please don't forget that you can self-host it, so you can own your data. But yes, the administration burden "killed it" for me, too, or at least the enthusiasm to make further edits, although it is a really promising app. I can only imagine taking care of such complex task as your main hobby when you're obsessive to take digital notes of everything. It's not been a year since I've spent a couple of days creating profiles, taking notes of events, conversations, etc, so it might be helpful in a couple of years when I can't remember any of these notes. However, as a self-hosed app, it might not survive that long and I could shut it down to give its resources to something else. Still, a great project, I hope it finds its target audience.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Bitwarden, Lastpass, et al all use vault/blob encryption. I would think a good personal CRM would as well - unless they themselves want access to your data or they just don’t care to do that work.
vortico 7y ago
What is a CRM? All acronyms should be defined somewhere in articles that use them. What's the benefit over a .txt file on a computer or a custom field in your Google contacts for remembering friend's kid's names?
- atsaloli 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...
  - vortico 7y ago
    I'm personally not really interested, I'm stating that the website needs to define this term if they want many people to understand what their service is. If you're trying to sell a product, don't force the customer to look up basic information about the product.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- inetsee 7y ago
  A quick search on CRM returns "Customer Relationship Management" as the first several results. Not everybody wants to share all this information with Google.
  - wolco 7y ago
    This is not a CRM you are not managing customer relationships. This is a social relationship manager. SRM.
sathishmanohar 7y ago
My first thought: "What a gold mine for hackers"
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Why bother hacking the Monica servers when you can probably much more cost effectively buy the data that Facebook via Cambridge-likes sell?
- jedieaston 7y ago
  As is Salesforce, yet people still use that.
flakiness 7y ago
I evaluated Monica a few years back but it lacked some features so I picked Highrise (from Basecamp). Then Highrise went maintenance mode and Monica still flourishes it looks. If there is a migration tool, I'll be happy to move.
wolco 7y ago
This is not a crm but a custom social relationship application. There is no customer.
brento 7y ago
I wanted to try it but I couldn't get it going using docker. I tried `docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up` and then `docker-compose exec monicahq php artisan setup:production` and I get an error about /var/www/monica/storage/artisisan not existing.
wil5for 7y ago
I was looking for a mobile version of a personal crm, so I ended up building one for myself (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id1455596937 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14...) There’s a lot of improvement to make apps like these less tedious with data entry. I’d also love to see more examples of products that excel at balancing the data-driven nature of technology with personal, empathetic human relationships. It’s a difficult line to walk well.
C14L 7y ago
In light of GDPR et al., how legal is this here in Europe? To store detailed personal data on people and even their children without written consent, and host that data on some company's servers, maybe even in the US. Is there some GDPR exception that allows private individuals to store as many personal details about as many people as they like?
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Is this really an issue? Arguing over whether or not someone can store contact information about people they personally know for the purpose of a private database? If that really falls under GDPR, then GDPR is way more fucking asinine than I ever realized.
  - C14L 7y ago
    Well, it would be personal data about me that they store on their servers. So I could, at any point, send a GDPR request and force them to send me any data they have stored about me. Or tell them to delete it. Or sue them for having it in the first place without my written consent. Same would be true for any other "online address book" type of app. Particulary funny if people added "notes" about you to your data set. Those notes would have to be send along with all the other data they have about you, because it is data about you.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  If it were, any email company would be in grave danger because they all have address book features where you can keep all of this info, and many even allow that data to be shared over the internet! As long as all data is stored securely, providing a place for keeping track of information isn't illegal.
kilroy123 7y ago
I've tried to use monica and make it work but I find it's a product that doesn't fit with my needs and lacking a lot of simple and useful features. For example, you have to manually import contacts. You import your 600 contacts and you can't even bulk remove /edit contacts. You're stuck with this huge list of contacts from your phone. Just the simple things such as bulk editing contacts are missing. So you end up with a list of contact on your phone / email, in addition to monica and it all ends up out of sync. I want one source of truth for all my contact and people I want to remain in contact with. With everything synced: CRM, phone, email contacts, etc.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  They are not secure with their hosting service, either run it yourself or find a different service that cares about security of their data.
vcdimension 7y ago
I've been doing this for years using BBDB and org-mode in emacs. I always forget to update it though.
city41 7y ago
I used to use Facebook as essentially a CRM, especially for birthdays. I haven’t used FB in years now and I ported the “CRM” data into google calendar and contacts manually. An actual dedicated CRM makes a lot of sense and it never really dawned on me. Thanks for posting this (and of course thanks for building it!)
stoicShell 7y ago
As a non-native English speaker I'm quite surprised at the use of the word "CRM" for “children of all your friends // your brother // your grand mother” Customers, seriously? Can someone educate me on this particular use of the terms? (to me it was only viable in business situations) Regardless of the second, third meaning of "customer" in English, I'm afraid the word just won't fly in e.g. Western Europe where it only has 1 meaning (someone who pays you for a service), and people often deplore that business, money distort relationships... It's just a cultural mistake to call Monica a CRM over there. It would be like calling a software "union organizer" to manage your -personal- group of friends in the US... not exactly a "neutral" term, nor one remotely related to "friends". Lots of subtexts in some words, translations not 1:1. PS to authors of Monica: I can help with a French translation ;-)
- bovermyer 7y ago
  Here, "CRM" is playing off of the concept, rather than the literal meaning. A CRM in practice is a social relationship management tool. So, calling something like this a "CRM" is meant to show people what the tool is used for using a familiar term. It's a little odd, but I understand what they're getting at.
  - sircastor 7y ago
    Perhaps in this case we could say the acronym is more of a "contact relationship management"
    - stoicShell 7y ago
      You might just have named the concept upon which Monica bases. - meta: it's interesting because having a word somehow 'creates' a concept in our minds, easier to think of and discuss I guess. - topic: the concept is truly interesting, and you 'get it' when reading Monica's marketing pitch for sure. But the way you name it makes it a category, and when I add up that the one feature of Facebook that even non-users still come for is Groups... somehow this all hints at the aforementioned category. Interesting. Food for thought.
- 7y ago

372 points by jandeboevrie 7y ago

So kind of like a combination contacts+notes app?

This comes up semi-frequently on HN. The Show HN post is here with lots of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

dang 7y ago
The other thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547, from last year.

Flimm 7y ago

Is anyone using this CRM? How have you benefitted from it in your personal life?

unixhero 7y ago
I tried it and really liked the features. So far I haven't been able to bake it into some kind of 'visit friends workflow'. And also I get this bad vibe from consulting-managing my personal relationships, it feels cold, cynical and controlling. It's not who I am. However it's not this apps' fault, but the feeling I get from trying to apply it and get some value out of putting effort into tracking personal relationships.
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  I feel similarly and would feel a bit awkward telling someone that I use it. On the other hand I think I have to face the fact that I am just not good at remembering a lot of tiny details - especially about people I have only met a few times or don't see very frequently. I think remembering stuff about a bunch of people is possible but when you interact with a lot it becomes more and more difficult to remember everything. Of course one could argue that in this case you maybe should "sort out" your relationships to determine who of all these people is really important to you but that feels even harder for me than using a personal CRM to have a good relationship to people that are not part of my circle of best friends. Family is another example. I didn't choose them but I have to see them once in a while and among other features recording what presents I got them and they got me would be good enough to at least not blow up some celebration because I would get the same present again or being able to connect presents to people who gave them.
darkkindness 7y ago
I tried running this a year ago and remember some things which stood out. But again, a year ago -- details are fuzzy, and likely outdated. pros: - The no-cost self-hosted setup was easy enough. I didn't have to jump through too many installation-debugging-hoops - Could easily customize the UI with minimal CSS edits - The app was pretty responsive in my view, and my view is that web apps are known for clunkiness - All the things you could do within the app were pretty obvious from the interface ("no manual required") cons: - Honestly, the thing that killed it for me was being required to select Male or Female for every person entered. It was ridiculous, so they probably have removed any sex/gender field by now, right? - To my knowledge it only had a web interface, so I couldn't open up and edit the data in a text editor (personal preference), for instance

anonfunction 7y ago

How do they make money or keep the service online? They don’t have any pricing and also say they don’t show ads or sell user data.

BinaryIdiot 7y ago
> They don’t have any pricing What do you mean? They literally have a link called "Pricing" at the top. It's $9 a month.
- iNate2000 7y ago
  No link on my phone. There it is - if I turn it sideways.

blondin 7y ago

i have seen this one on trending php projects on github quite often. as a side note, the php community is quite good at coming up with cms projects. i wonder what makes the language so nice for writing content management systems in? might be interesting to learn about.

muglug 7y ago
It’s fairly simple, with a syntax close to JavaScript that’s easy to pick up.
- milankragujevic 7y ago
  There are many languages that are as simple or even simpler than PHP in syntax, and if you're comparing it to JavaScript, nodejs is literally JavaScript. PHP's biggest strength is ease of deployment and popularity. Deploying a nodejs app is a nightmare, because of the fact that nodejs isn't a web-first language in the traditional sense. It's a general purpose language that can do many things, but that causes problems for, i.e. hosting multiple apps on a single server (without having to coordinate ports between them, firewall them off, and have a single nginx instance proxying to them based on domain names). PHP is simple to deploy. If you have a shared hosting, just upload files to the FTP server, and open the page in the browser. It works. If you have a root server, just `sudo apt install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-php7.3` and put the files in /var/www/html/ It's a perfect fit for web because that's the only place where it actually works. It does one thing (platform) and it does it well (from the deployment perspective). It has (had) it's warts in the years, but I don't find many things that it doesn't have compared to other scripting languages.
  - flir 7y ago
    Think you're underestimating the array functions. They might be ugly (programmers tend to prefer expressive array syntax), but their learning curve is the best of any language. So much of programming for the web is "do something to an array of stuff", and PHP makes that super-easy.
  - wolco 7y ago

BinaryIdiot 7y ago

Something like this is what I need. I have an awful memory and need something to catalog the people I meet and know. Which would probably sound a bit odd if the people found out but otherwise I wouldn't remember. My issue is ubiquity and reliability. This doesn't seem to have a mobile component and I'm not sure how reliable the service or even company is. The latter of which can come in time. It's cool, though. I've been thinking about using something like Airtable for this sort of thing.

edraferi 7y ago
I agree. I want something like this that: (1) is a native mobile/desktop app instead of web-first, because there’s no reason my most personal stuff should be available globally (2) stores data in a REALLY open format like JSON or YAML, because I want maximum interoperability and minimum but rot (3) synchronizes across devices using generic file sync tools like Dropbox, google drive, or One Drive, because all my other stuff is in there and they’re as secure as anything gets (4) runs anywhere without administrator privileges or special run times, because I want to be able to use it at work (5) federated the data store so I can have a single view into personal, professional and proprietary information, while storing and sharing them appropriately to the sensitivity of the data.
- zwarag 7y ago
  What would you be ready to pay for such a software?
w33ble 7y ago
I’m the same and have been using it mostly just to keep track of the names of everyone’s jobs, SO, and kids. The site on mobile is usable, an app might help but isn’t required. As for your data, it lets you export everything quite easily (as JSON IIRC). And since there’s a version you can host yourself, if their service goes away, you can export and self host. It’s pretty easy to get going on a free Heroku instance too. Consider trying it out if you’re interested in a tool like this.

newscracker 7y ago

I wonder how many paid users are there for the hosted version and how the pricing was arrived at. Paying $90 a year for a personal CRM seems quite high since this is for each user. The application allows adding people, relationships, notes about people, events, contacts had with people, etc. There is no integration with any data source to pull information automatically. There is no integration with any platform or application to communicate with others. I believe the hosted application could earn a lot more to support development and maintenance at a lower price point and reaching many more people.

tiborsaas 7y ago
It's a heavy pricetag considering other free alternatives exists. If you look at the features page, I could replicate that with Asana easily.
- davidu 7y ago
  SaaS is another way of outsourcing IT. Personal IT or someone else's. You could replace dropbox with an FTP server, too. But most people value their time more and will just pay $90 who want this set of features.
- modarts 7y ago
  Airtable as well
groby_b 7y ago
How is $90 for a hosted application expensive? You're paying somebody $7.50 each month. That's... a latte and a half for the Starbucks crowd. Even at minimum wage, you're paying somebody to do 45 minutes of work for you. And if organizing your contacts/keeping a log/finding pertinent info is significantly less than 45 minutes/month of work, may I humbly suggest you don't need a CRM? And my wild guess is the devs know that, and they know that they'll lose the casual crowd anyways. "We make it up in volume" doesn't work if the volume just kicks the tires and leaves. In my experience, what people really want when they're in that range is not something to manage your contacts - you want help with keeping a household book. (Or butler's book). And I really haven't seen an app to help there yet.

sdan 7y ago

I like the idea behind a personal CRM. Personally, however, I don't think I've come to the point in my life where I forget about people when I meet them in-person. On top of that, my biggest issue with tools like these (not bashing, really appreciate that products like these exist) is that they don't intrinsically flow with my life. Honestly Apple Contact is probably as far as I'll go (if even that... I leave a lot of calls without properly IDing them). Personally, I find filling out all the info about a person into some database takes a lot of time... which I guess overtime may save some time based on if you're really utilizing it. This is similar to photos: I am a strong privacy advocate, but Google Photos simply is a far greater product than if I were to spend 10x the time combing through photos to create animations and videos. Obviously, however, in business, a CRM is a great tool (CRM for investors for example). Which makes me think... maybe I haven't met that many people? Love the idea of the product and appreciate it exists. I think I'll stick to Apple Contacts and Twitter.

IanCal 7y ago
Perhaps it's just about what you're good at. I find it very hard for some reason to remember names or other details like which set of kids are with which parents, even for fairly close family. I've used anki to good effect on this kind of thing but it's not quite the right structure for looking things up. I've been meaning to try Monica because it's a structured place to store the kind of information I find myself forgetting easily and that is harder to ask again.

tempodox 7y ago

Not that I see myself needing this in the foreseeable future, but I still want to commend the structure of the offering. There's a paid tier, a free tier, and the possibility of installing the open-source software on your own host computer. I think that's a great set of choices. I wish more webware were organized like that.

nebulous1 7y ago
It's great that the self hosted version is fully featured. On the other hand $90/year seems way overpriced.
- ddevault 7y ago
  $7.50/month? Seems pretty reasonable to me.
  - nebulous1 7y ago
    Not to me, but it I guess it depends on your usage. However, for something like this I don't think you want to be competing with a Netflix subscription price-wise. I would have aimed for a dollar or two a month. Admittedly this was probably their initial idea too, but things don't always work out as planned.
    - xwdv 7y ago
      What’s your yearly income?
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      To be frank, if your monthly value comparison for something like this is Netflix, you aren't the target demo.
      - nebulous1 7y ago
        Okay, what do you want to compare it to?

rpastuszak 7y ago

Is anyone using Monica successfully? What's your experience with it? I notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people/responding to text messages earlier than in 3 days, so this seems to hit the spot for me.

ratiolat 7y ago

I've tried the self hosted version. What kind of app on android should one use? I think there's supposed to be chandler and I either did not find the app in play store or it did not work. It has been many months since I tried that though.

jandeboevrie 7y ago
The app which let's you browse the internet? Type in the address of your server and you should be presented with Monica. Works quite well on mobile.
- ratiolat 7y ago
  Ah. Memory served me well, although it got the timeline wrong: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler https://github.com/monicahq/chandler It has been deprecated App is needed to avoid copypasta and inconveniences
rahimnathwani 7y ago
The first thing I'd like to do after meeting someone is enter their name and a brief note. With the web version, this requires submitting two forms. I created a mobile app that lets you do this in one step. You just need to configure it with your API key: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twilam.monicacompanion https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twilam.mon...

ezequiel-garzon 7y ago

As in Monica Geller, right?

dejj 7y ago

I like the design statement that the text "Proudly OPEN SOURCE" is slightly off-center.

weinzierl 7y ago
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but it looks off to me.

eb0la 7y ago

The moment you or your friends have kids, there are a lot of infrequent interactions with people and the names (and ages) really matter. I guess the killing feature for me would be remembering names of parents if my kids schoolmates. You end up calling people "the mother of $KID" for KID in kids in classOf($my_kids).

officemonkey 7y ago
I have a real lo-tech solution for that. I carry a bound memorandum book (field notes or the like) in my pocket and write down the everything I know about each kid. One kid per page. Example: Julian, blonde, in same class, 3rd and 4th grade Sister: Kiera, two years younger, big hello kitty fan Mother: Monica, red hair, glasses. Dad: ??, looks like Ron Swanson. I just fill in the blanks when I learn them. By the time I'm exchanging phone numbers, I usually have the names down. Families move and friendships change, so I don't invest a lot of time memorizing details.
- technothrasher 7y ago
  Really?? Why all the data recording? I'm not criticizing, I've just never paid that much attention to the families of my kid's friends. Get togethers just sort of naturally happen, and pertenent details of families of kids who my kid likes enough to hang out with a lot aren't that hard to remember.
  - Hackbraten 7y ago
    What may be easy for you may be hard to impossible for other people.
  - cmiles74 7y ago
    I can't remember these people's names and I am definitely trying. Even worse is when I confidently use the wrong name when I'm talking to one of these parents. Conversation immediately ceases, it's so awkward that I mostly try not to use names at all. There are some parents that I remember, I think because I see them often enough or they might be particularly unique looking (to me, anyway). There seems to be some mental bar that needs to be crossed before I can reliably recognize them, otherwise they all kind of blend together for me.

wnscooke 7y ago

It's even available on Cloudron.io too.

anotherevan 7y ago

I would be very interested in this if it can be used as a Carddav server. I run a Nextcloud instance solely as a central point for managing contacts. It syncs with my phone, alias lists for NCID and various other bits and pieces. Something that specialises in this a bit more, but will still fill in that piece would be quite attractive.

Operyl 7y ago
It does look like they implemented carddav earlier this year!

jcslzr 7y ago

Monica? Bitchard friend?

pettycashstash2 7y ago
I find your crude language repulsive. Hoping moderators will remove comment. Not only is your comment inappropriate, it bring zero value to discussion

polyterative 7y ago

Or just use notion

random_visitor 7y ago
That actually works really well. When I found out that Notion is completely free for students, I moved from every notes site apart from Google Keep and manage almost everything on it.

kristofferR 7y ago

I looked into Monica recently, but feel that it's way too complicated TBH. Information paralysis, too many fields you can fill with irrelevant information. The lack of mobile apps is also a massive issue - I want to look up information right before I meet someone, and remember most to note down right afterwards. For my usage the simplicity of Hippo (https://gethippo.app/ https://gethippo.app/) makes me much more likely to actively use it.

benhurmarcel 7y ago
Thanks for the link, a simple mobile app is more in line with what I'd be looking for for this use.
- ta999999171 7y ago
  Hope you use an iPhone... no Android/HTML5 app...

petr25102018 7y ago

My app is in the same space (or at least the original idea of it) but over time I really doubt it is a space to make any money in. People just don't pay for a personal software like this. I am glad to see that they have over 40,000 users (maybe not active tho) so it proves that the idea is not completely unreasonable. Maybe it just needs a little bit different approach, I don't know. I myself struggle with what to do with my own app in the space.

edraferi 7y ago
What’s your app? What have you tried?
- petr25102018 7y ago
  https://contactcache.com/ https://contactcache.com/ I didn't get to monetize it as I don't have all the features yet & also I don't see a big demand for it.

madsbuch 7y ago

These types of software has, to me, some big pitfalls: 1. The administrative burden: In over for the software to have any value, the user is imposed a huge documentation burden all the time. 2. Privacy: This is probably the worst. Imagine that you write down intimate details of your friends of family, and the platform has a leak. Also, the subjects have _no_ data control what so ever. In the privacy regard this is probably worst in class.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
713233eb 7y ago
Please don't forget that you can self-host it, so you can own your data. But yes, the administration burden "killed it" for me, too, or at least the enthusiasm to make further edits, although it is a really promising app. I can only imagine taking care of such complex task as your main hobby when you're obsessive to take digital notes of everything. It's not been a year since I've spent a couple of days creating profiles, taking notes of events, conversations, etc, so it might be helpful in a couple of years when I can't remember any of these notes. However, as a self-hosed app, it might not survive that long and I could shut it down to give its resources to something else. Still, a great project, I hope it finds its target audience.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Bitwarden, Lastpass, et al all use vault/blob encryption. I would think a good personal CRM would as well - unless they themselves want access to your data or they just don’t care to do that work.

vortico 7y ago

What is a CRM? All acronyms should be defined somewhere in articles that use them. What's the benefit over a .txt file on a computer or a custom field in your Google contacts for remembering friend's kid's names?

atsaloli 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...
- vortico 7y ago
  I'm personally not really interested, I'm stating that the website needs to define this term if they want many people to understand what their service is. If you're trying to sell a product, don't force the customer to look up basic information about the product.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
inetsee 7y ago
A quick search on CRM returns "Customer Relationship Management" as the first several results. Not everybody wants to share all this information with Google.
- wolco 7y ago
  This is not a CRM you are not managing customer relationships. This is a social relationship manager. SRM.

sathishmanohar 7y ago

My first thought: "What a gold mine for hackers"

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Why bother hacking the Monica servers when you can probably much more cost effectively buy the data that Facebook via Cambridge-likes sell?
jedieaston 7y ago
As is Salesforce, yet people still use that.

flakiness 7y ago

I evaluated Monica a few years back but it lacked some features so I picked Highrise (from Basecamp). Then Highrise went maintenance mode and Monica still flourishes it looks. If there is a migration tool, I'll be happy to move.

wolco 7y ago

This is not a crm but a custom social relationship application. There is no customer.

brento 7y ago

I wanted to try it but I couldn't get it going using docker. I tried `docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up` and then `docker-compose exec monicahq php artisan setup:production` and I get an error about /var/www/monica/storage/artisisan not existing.

wil5for 7y ago

I was looking for a mobile version of a personal crm, so I ended up building one for myself (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id1455596937 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14...) There’s a lot of improvement to make apps like these less tedious with data entry. I’d also love to see more examples of products that excel at balancing the data-driven nature of technology with personal, empathetic human relationships. It’s a difficult line to walk well.

C14L 7y ago

In light of GDPR et al., how legal is this here in Europe? To store detailed personal data on people and even their children without written consent, and host that data on some company's servers, maybe even in the US. Is there some GDPR exception that allows private individuals to store as many personal details about as many people as they like?

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Is this really an issue? Arguing over whether or not someone can store contact information about people they personally know for the purpose of a private database? If that really falls under GDPR, then GDPR is way more fucking asinine than I ever realized.
- C14L 7y ago
  Well, it would be personal data about me that they store on their servers. So I could, at any point, send a GDPR request and force them to send me any data they have stored about me. Or tell them to delete it. Or sue them for having it in the first place without my written consent. Same would be true for any other "online address book" type of app. Particulary funny if people added "notes" about you to your data set. Those notes would have to be send along with all the other data they have about you, because it is data about you.
jeroenhd 7y ago
If it were, any email company would be in grave danger because they all have address book features where you can keep all of this info, and many even allow that data to be shared over the internet! As long as all data is stored securely, providing a place for keeping track of information isn't illegal.

kilroy123 7y ago

I've tried to use monica and make it work but I find it's a product that doesn't fit with my needs and lacking a lot of simple and useful features. For example, you have to manually import contacts. You import your 600 contacts and you can't even bulk remove /edit contacts. You're stuck with this huge list of contacts from your phone. Just the simple things such as bulk editing contacts are missing. So you end up with a list of contact on your phone / email, in addition to monica and it all ends up out of sync. I want one source of truth for all my contact and people I want to remain in contact with. With everything synced: CRM, phone, email contacts, etc.

o-__-o 7y ago
They are not secure with their hosting service, either run it yourself or find a different service that cares about security of their data.

vcdimension 7y ago

I've been doing this for years using BBDB and org-mode in emacs. I always forget to update it though.

city41 7y ago

I used to use Facebook as essentially a CRM, especially for birthdays. I haven’t used FB in years now and I ported the “CRM” data into google calendar and contacts manually. An actual dedicated CRM makes a lot of sense and it never really dawned on me. Thanks for posting this (and of course thanks for building it!)

stoicShell 7y ago

As a non-native English speaker I'm quite surprised at the use of the word "CRM" for “children of all your friends // your brother // your grand mother” Customers, seriously? Can someone educate me on this particular use of the terms? (to me it was only viable in business situations) Regardless of the second, third meaning of "customer" in English, I'm afraid the word just won't fly in e.g. Western Europe where it only has 1 meaning (someone who pays you for a service), and people often deplore that business, money distort relationships... It's just a cultural mistake to call Monica a CRM over there. It would be like calling a software "union organizer" to manage your -personal- group of friends in the US... not exactly a "neutral" term, nor one remotely related to "friends". Lots of subtexts in some words, translations not 1:1. PS to authors of Monica: I can help with a French translation ;-)

bovermyer 7y ago
Here, "CRM" is playing off of the concept, rather than the literal meaning. A CRM in practice is a social relationship management tool. So, calling something like this a "CRM" is meant to show people what the tool is used for using a familiar term. It's a little odd, but I understand what they're getting at.
- sircastor 7y ago
  Perhaps in this case we could say the acronym is more of a "contact relationship management"
  - stoicShell 7y ago
    You might just have named the concept upon which Monica bases. - meta: it's interesting because having a word somehow 'creates' a concept in our minds, easier to think of and discuss I guess. - topic: the concept is truly interesting, and you 'get it' when reading Monica's marketing pitch for sure. But the way you name it makes it a category, and when I add up that the one feature of Facebook that even non-users still come for is Groups... somehow this all hints at the aforementioned category. Interesting. Food for thought.
7y ago