this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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I've been using various contact managers but they all feel like sales tools, so I built Nametag to track the people I actually care about - friends, family, colleagues. It maps relationships, tracks birthdays, and visualizes your network as an interactive graph.

Self-hosting highlights:

  • Docker Compose setup - PostgreSQL, Redis, Next.js app. One command to start
  • No email service needed - Accounts auto-verify, works completely offline
  • Unlimited contacts - No artificial limits (hosted version caps free tier at 50)
  • Complete data ownership - Your relationship data stays on your infrastructure
  • Optional email - Can configure Resend if you want birthday/reminder emails
  • No phone-home - Runs entirely on your network if you want
  • AGPL-3.0 licensed - Full source access

Features:

  • Track people with flexible attributes (name, birthday, contact info, notes)
  • Map relationships between people (family, friends, colleagues, custom types)
  • Interactive D3.js network graph visualization
  • Custom groups for organizing contacts
  • Birthday reminders (if you configure email)
  • Dark mode, i18n (English and Spanish for now, but more are coming)
  • Mobile-responsive

Tech stack:

  • Next.js 16 (TypeScript)
  • PostgreSQL + Prisma ORM
  • Redis for rate limiting
  • D3.js for graph visualization
  • Tailwind CSS

Quick start:

git clone https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag
cd nametag
# Edit .env with your secrets
docker-compose up -d

Database migrations run automatically on first start.

Access at localhost:3000.

There's also a hosted version at https://nametag.one/ if you don't want to self-host (helps fund development).

GitHub: https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag

Happy to answer questions about the setup, architecture, or deployment!

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[–] Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Quick question, when hosted plan says up to 50 people, is that you can add 50 people to remember or 50 people can access one database?

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

It means you can add up to 50 contacts. I might have to clarify that. Thanks!

[–] cravl@slrpnk.net 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

For small personal deployments, is SQLite support planned? It's crazy performant and I have to imagine it would work for up to 500 contacts at the very least, which should cover the majority of deployments. Making Redis optional (otherwise using a basic in-memory KV store of some kind) would also be cool.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago

I love SQLite, and I agree that it could very well fit this project. I'm adding it to my list :) Thanks for the feedback!

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 2 points 1 week ago

Agree, it seems kind of resource heavy for my use case

[–] femtek@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This might work for my poly group. We always wanted to visualize how we are all connected.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

Careful! You might realise you’re cousins 😂

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Pardon my ignorance but what is a poly group?

[–] jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Polyamory, multiple partners and they each have multiple partners

[–] femtek@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, we have been wanting to make a who is connected to who chart. I was going to use draw io but it was a little manual.

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[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people's relationships. Polyamory, in case you're unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

  • Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you'd draw lines between them as well.

  • Extend an extra level and include all of your partners' partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

  • Extend that further and include all of your partners' partners' partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don't personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I had a feeling they were talking about polyamory, but I wasn't sure since it felt a lot like over-sharing. But I guess it's good to announce any and all use cases for something like this, why not. 👍

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[–] thurstylark@lemmy.today 15 points 1 week ago

A+ for custom connection types. Polycules rejoyce!

[–] fastfinge@rblind.com 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Any way to sync with contacts on mobile? I’d love one source of truth.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

CardDAV synchronization is next on the list of priorities :)

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm subbing to releases, definitely keeping an eye on this!
I'm currently having sync my carddav to nocodb for relationships and other details since monica went bust, which isn't very practical.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

I hear you. I've also used nocodb for this, and also tried Obsidian and of course Monica, but nothing felt "right". It's crazy how we all arrive at the same solutions to this problem :)

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[–] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Does it have caldav/carddav capabilities? That's key to keep it all there.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Oh, snap. Thanks so much. This is great stuff.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

I was about to comment "Who has such a vast family to not be able to keep track (excluding the really extended family)?"

That would make more sense.

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[–] petersr@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I remember using Monica years back for something similar. Quickly lost the habits of using it since it was a lot of work updating and it didn't feel like it was worth the effort.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That’s one of the reasons I started this project. Monica is a bit too complex for my needs.

[–] petersr@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Makes sense. Good work.

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[–] bootloop@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Congratulations on the launch! Could this also be used as a genealogy tree? I've been wanting for a long time to create mine but the options I found were too expensive and I wasn't up to create it from scratch (too long and not future proof).

[–] Harald_im_Netz@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago

Ugh, also looking for a way to digitalize mine, but all tools I've found are either way too complex or lack critical functions, like e. g. supporting patchwork families/split-up parents which have new children.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you! Yes, I've thought about this and it's in my roadmap to create an "export group as family tree to PDF" function. Would that be good enough for your needs?

[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This looks fun. I think I'm going to try that.

I've also just randomly noticed that the link on alternative.to doesn't work for whatever reason: https://alternativeto.net/software/monica/?toid=nametag--never-forget-a-name-again

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[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does it support tracking the last time I contacted a person and reminders if I haven't contacted someone for a while? Eg I'd like to contact certain people every X weeks.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Yes! That's one of the main features of this project :)

[–] erick@piefed.erick.sh 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Very nice project. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.

Just a few days ago I ended up rolling my own PRM using a couple of tables in my NocoDB instance, Node-RED for notifications, and a couple of Siri Shortcuts as UI for my devices, mostly because as many already said, even Monica is a bit too much and quite hard to use.

I might as well give a spin and see if I can modify my shortcuts to use this instead!

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks! I hope it fits your needs

[–] dieTasse@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago

Great scott! That's heavy.

[–] eli@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This looks great. I'm running a Teable instance, but sometimes it feels like it is "too much" sometimes.

I think I'll deploy this for fun to check out. I don't see anything specific here for things like gift ideas or favorite flowers/colors? Like custom tags/categories/attributes.

I'm using Teable to track things like that, but I love the visualization here, reminds me of my obsidian mind map lol.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thanks for the feedback! I wanted to keep it simple, so I just added a single notes field for purposes like those. This said, I am also considering adding custom attributes to people to solve these needs that apply to some of the contacts, but not all.

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[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Looks good. I've considered a personal CRM for some time and have been using Obsidian a little bit. Having said that, I am open to something more tailored to the task. A question: what would it look like if someone wanted to export their data out of this tool later? Do I need to be a programmer to migrate away or is it relatively simple?

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There is an "export" option in the account settings :) It's not in any specific standard (I'm planning to implement CardDAV soon), but it's exported to JSON, so you can see all the data.

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Great to hear. I might give it a try in a limited area, like meeting people from a new hobby or friend group, then expand from there if it works f or me. I definitely see the benefit, especially for ADHD types who might otherwise forget to call someone for 1...2...3...12 months. :-D Thank you for making a cool piece of software.

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Great! Thanks for your kind words. Let me know if you like it :)

[–] jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 2 points 1 week ago (6 children)

This looks cool, interested to see how this stacks up against Monica & if there are plans for a mobile app

[–] SomeDudeFromSpace@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

Mobile apps are on the roadmap! I’ll try to actually publish a roadmap at some point.

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