Hey all, I manage a number of domains and homelab services, and keeping track of certificates becomes annoying once there are more than a handful — especially for services and appliances that don’t support ACME.
So I built a lightweight iOS app that periodically checks the certificate actually being served by each endpoint and alerts before expiry.
I’m giving away a few promo codes if anyone wants to test it: 👉 https://getfree.app/app/ssl-certificate-monitor
Would love to hear your thoughts or feature requests.
Disclosure: I’m the developer.
There’s dozens of free open source apps that do this already. Why would I want to lock into a what appears to be proprietary (and probably vibe coded soon to be abandoned) project?
Fair enough! Existing tools are great, but building something tailored just fits my workflow much better. Since I rely on it daily, I’ll be actively maintaining it anyway—use whatever works best for you!
Oh, one of my pet peeves, certificates that expires unexpectedly. Because no they don’t, you know damn well when the certificate expires from the moment it is issued and there is literally no need to monitor anything, you just need a calendar.
The reasons for not doing this can be organizational (shared calendars are a pain), laziness, lack of documentation (we know it expired, but we don’t know/remember how to update it) or task overload (the new certificate solved an incident likely because the previous instance expired without warning and now it is past office hours and everyone goes home and tomorrow there’s a different incident, so no one follows up, repeat next year).
Granted, I’ve been guilty of all of those, but a calendar should be all that you need.
100% agree in theory! A calendar should be enough, but human nature and silent auto-renew failures always win. This is basically an automated safety net to save future-me from current-me. 😄
You’re right, a calendar won’t save you from auto-renewal failures. My pet peeve might be outdated 😬
Thanks for the heads-up.
