Half a year ago, I started building a side project. Nothing super special, a simple Flask API with a database and a frontend.
Early on, I wanted to set up error monitoring, so I signed up for Sentry.
The free tier was pretty generous. 5000 events a month. But my project became bigger than expected, so I used it all up in 3 days.
The next pricing tier was $26 a month. For fifty thousand events.
Fifty thousand events for a side project where I'm not making money yet.
I was annoyed, because I was looking at an error monitoring service costing more per month than my hosting.
So I built something simpler.
It's error monitoring for Python. When your code breaks, Ravn captures the exception, groups it with similar errors, and shows you what happened. Pretty simple actually.
I also added AI root cause analysis, basically due to peer pressure, because everyone is doing it right now. Now, when an error happens, it tries to tell you why, not just that it happened.
The setup is two lines of code:
import ravn
ravn.init(api_key="your_api_key")
That's it, every unhandled exception gets captured. No configuration necessary.
I built the backend in FastAPI because async felt right for it. PostgreSQL for storage, pgvector for the embeddings, Redis for caching. React on the frontend because it's what I use all the time and it works.
The Python SDK is on PyPI. Open source. People can contribute if they want.
I spent way too long on the dashboard because I'm very picky about design and I don't want it to look like average vibe code slop.
It's early. The AI analysis works but it's not a new revelation. Sometimes it just tells you the obvious thing. The alerting is basics, but it works. Slack and Discord only right now.
I built this because I was frustrated, not because I'm trying to kill Sentry (that'd be pretty funny actually). Jokes aside, Sentry is great. Extremely solid tool. Just overpriced and too heavy for me.
If you want to build something small and don't want to think about error monitoring, Ravn is there. If you need enterprise features and have a team, Sentry is probably the right call.
The demo is at app.getravn.com/demo. No signup, no credit card. Just look at what error monitoring actually looks like.
The SDK is on PyPI (ravn-sdk) if you want to install it.
I'm genuinely interested in what's broken about this or what I'm missing. Honest feedback truly appreciated.