Show HN: I built a tiny Datadog alternative for small SaaS apps

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a small developer tool on the side for the last few months, and I wanted to share what I built and also what I learned in the process.

I maintain a few small SaaS apps, and I’ve always felt that the existing monitoring tools were too noisy, too expensive, or too heavy for small teams. I didn’t need dozens of dashboards and hundreds of metrics — I just wanted logs, metrics, alerts, and audit logs in one lightweight place, ideally something SDK-based.

That led me to build a tiny Datadog-like tool that I’m calling LogMint.

What LogMint handles

1. Application logs

2. Metrics

3. Alerts

4. Dashboards

5. Audit logs

All SDK-based, no agent

I’m not trying to compete with the big tools. This is more of a “can a solo dev build something usable and small?” experiment.

What I learned while building it

1. Building dashboards and widgets from scratch takes way more time than ingestion Visualization was the hardest part.

2. Noise reduction matters more than number of features The reason I built this was that I was drowning in alerts I didn’t care about. Designing a system that stays quiet was a challenge.

3. Getting the first user is harder than writing the backend I’ve tried posting on dev blogs and sharing writeups. I haven’t gotten real usage yet. Still figuring this part out.

Why I’m posting this

I’d like feedback from people who’ve built developer tools or monitoring systems. Mainly:

1. Is this approach (SDK > agent) useful?

2. Are small teams actually looking for simpler monitoring?

3. What “minimum useful version” should such a tool have?

For those who built devtools: how did your first users show up?

If anyone wants to see it, the project is here: (https://getlogmint.com)

Not selling anything — just sharing the project, in case others find this interesting or have thoughts on what I should improve.