Are you still there?
That's what a kerchunk asks - key the repeater for half a second, listen for it to come back. We ask it for you, on a timer, about every server, service and radio you run. Closed beta for now, and very nearly ready.
Got early access? Sign in.
Want to know when we launch, or ask a question? contact@kerchunk.io reaches a person.
What you're waiting for
Every monitor is a creature that lives on the answers
Uptime monitoring is a solved problem and a boring one - nobody opens a wall of green ticks for the pleasure of it, which is exactly why an amber one can sit there for a fortnight without anybody noticing. So yours gets hungry. Go quiet for long enough and it dies properly, with a name and a date attached. It's a slightly silly device that works, because people keep checking on something they feel responsible for long after they've stopped opening a dashboard.
- egg day one
- hatchling 7 days
- juvenile 30 days
- adult 90 days
- ancient 365 days
A year of uptime ought to look like something you earned, rather than read as a cold 99.9% on a chart nobody scrolls to.
An ordinary monitor, taken seriously
43 ways to ask the question
Push a heartbeat from cron, a systemd timer or a Docker healthcheck - or hand us a target and we check it for you. HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS and domain expiry, plus SNMP, Docker, UPS daemons, mail and database protocols, and game servers. Each one reads the protocol rather than the port, because a Postgres in crash recovery accepts connections for the whole outage.
The half that is not public
A familiar is a small outbound-only agent you run inside your own network, so the NAS, the Jellyfin container and the router UI on a private address are all watchable. No port forwarding, no tunnel, nothing inbound - ever.
Alerts where you already are
Seventeen services, weighted towards the ones you host yourself: ntfy, Gotify, MQTT straight into Home Assistant, Matrix, Signal, Apprise. Email, an RSS feed and the Discord bot are free on every plan. One alert per state change, so a flapping server cannot page you all night.
A badge you chose to display
Every creature gets a live badge for a README in four shapes, and your account gets a banner sized for a forum signature. SVG, PNG or animated GIF, in Markdown, HTML or BBCode - BBCode because ServeTheHome and TrueNAS threads still run on it.
Never punished for our faults
If we go down, your streaks don't. Our own outages freeze every timer with no exceptions, and the window is recorded as ours. A downgrade or a failed card freezes creatures rather than killing them. That rule is not negotiable.
The part nobody else does
Your shack is not an HTTP endpoint
Amateur radio software mostly does not speak HTTP, and a commercial monitor has no particular reason to care. So a rotator whose serial link dropped a fortnight ago keeps accepting connections and pointing the dish at the ground. An APRS igate keeps its process running while the radio half quietly dies. A GPS-disciplined clock keeps answering on port 123 long after it lost lock. Here those are first-class checks that read the protocol.
- rigctld and rotctld - ask Hamlib where the dish is pointing
- APRS-IS - listen for your own callsign, so a transmit-deaf igate is caught
- WSJT-X - decodes arriving, judged against normal for your band
- Winlink RMS - the gateway people rely on when nothing else works
- ADS-B, gpsd, SeedLink, rtl_tcp - the receivers that fail deaf, not down
Built by someone who runs a licensed station, which is the only reason any of it is on the list.
What it will cost
- Free $0/mo 5 creatures, 5-minute checks, no card
- Plus $2.99/mo 15 creatures, 1-minute checks, a familiar
- Max $9.99/mo 100 creatures, 30-second checks, the API
Annual billing gets you a month free. The free tier is somewhere you could happily stay - five creatures is about what a home setup needs, and we'd rather you stayed there than felt squeezed out of it.
Who's building it
One person, working from Aotearoa New Zealand, with a day job and a homelab they've broken often enough to know what monitoring actually has to do. No investors, no board, no team. The creatures are digital art made by a human artist we pay - no AI artwork, here or ever.
The doors open soon. contact@kerchunk.io reaches a person if you'd like to be told when they do.
Uptime monitoring for people who run things for the love of it.