{"slug": "i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr", "title": "I've Been Writing About Pingoni Like It's a Company. It's Not. It's just me, $0 MRR, and a lot of 2am debugging.", "summary": "Ayomide, a third-year CS student in Edmonton, built Pingoni, a drop-in API monitoring tool for small Node and Python teams, from his dorm room. After seven months of development, Pingoni has zero MRR, zero paying customers, and only one signup. Ayomide decided to stop pretending Pingoni is a company and be honest about being a solo developer building an alternative to expensive monitoring tools like Datadog.", "body_md": "I'm Ayomide. Third-year CS student in Edmonton. I build Pingoni from my dorm room between classes, assignments, and trying to remember what sleep feels like.\n\n**What's Pingoni?** Drop-in API monitoring for small Node and Python teams. One SDK install, every request tracked, errors caught in real-time, alerts in your inbox before your users find out. Plus LLM cost tracking see exactly how much OpenAI is costing you per user, per feature. No YAML. No agents. No setup calls. Just install and go.\n\nFor months I wrote about it like it was something bigger. \"We built this.\" \"Our team ships weekly.\" \"Contact us.\"\n\nThere is no \"we.\" There's me. One laptop. A $9/month Pro tier nobody's paid for yet. And a dashboard I've stared at so long I see request logs when I close my eyes.\n\n| Metric | Value |\n|---|---|\n| MRR | $0 |\n| Paying customers | 0 |\n| Total signups | 1 |\n| Months building | 7 |\n| Hours of sleep per night | debatable |\n\nI have one signup. **One.** And I'm genuinely grateful for them. They might not even be active. But someone cared enough to click \"Get Started\" and that kept me going for a week.\n\nTwo features:\n\n**Stack traces that don't suck.** Click any error in your dashboard, get the full trace instantly. No digging through logs. No grep. Just the answer. I built this because I was *that* guy 2am, production down, scrolling through 10,000 lines of garbage.\n\n**LLM cost tracking.** Drop one line after your OpenAI call and see exactly how much each user, each feature, each model costs you. I built this after my side project's OpenAI bill jumped 400% and I had no idea why. Turns out one buggy loop was calling GPT-4 in a `while(true)`\n\n. Found it in 30 seconds with Pingoni. Would've taken hours before.\n\nI once pushed a \"fix' that broke error tracking entirely. For three days Pingoni was silently dropping every single error. My dashboard showed 100% uptime, 0 errors. *Perfect.* I was so proud.\n\nThen I checked the raw database. Thousands of errors. None of them made it to the dashboard. My \"fix\" had a typo in the error handler path. The SDK was catching errors and... throwing them into the void.\n\nI found out because I was debugging my own API at 3am, saw an error in my terminal, and wondered why it wasn't in Pingoni. It had been three days. Three days of blind confidence.\n\nI fixed it at 4am. Wrote a test. Never spoke of it again. Until now.\n\nI used to think I needed to look like a \"real company\" to be taken seriously. Professional copy. Corporate \"we.\" Hiding that I'm a student building this between lectures.\n\nBut here's what I've learned: **developers don't trust perfection. They trust honesty.**\n\nYou know what gets DMs? \"0 customers, built a Datadog alternative.\" Not \"enterprise-grade observability platform.\"\n\nSo this is me. No \"we.\" No corporate speak. Just a student in Edmonton who was tired of expensive monitoring tools and built his own.\n\n**One install. Start free 10,000 requests/month, no credit card. $9/month when you outgrow it. I read every email.**\n\nIf you're a solo dev or small team drowning in Datadog bills, Pingoni might be for you. If not, no worries — thanks for reading this far.\n\nIf you want to follow along, I'll keep posting the real numbers. The wins and the 3am disasters.\n\n**Next milestone: 10 signups.** I'll let you know when I get there.\n\n*Built with ☕ and no sleep by Ayomide in Edmonton. Questions? hello@pingoni.com I read everything.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/silentishim/ive-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-its-a-company-its-not-its-just-me-0-mrr-and-a-lot-of-1nm3", "published_at": "2026-07-20 13:14:28+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-20 13:33:29.095249+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Ayomide", "Pingoni", "OpenAI", "Datadog", "Edmonton"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-ve-been-writing-about-pingoni-like-it-s-a-company-it-s-not-it-s-just-me-0-mrr.jsonld"}}