After selfhosting dozens of applications myself I am looking forward to giving something back to the community. I wanted a way to manage both my professional and personal relationships better. Especially with kids around it feels difficult to keep up with everyone’s birthdays, diets, events and whatnot . Originally I used Monica but development has stalled since quite a while and the new version was a fair bit more complex than I needed. So over the last many months I built my own solution.
What it can do: You can add contacts (even with custom fields), relationships, reminders, activities and notes. Optionally you can also activate the CardDav server to sync contacts to and from your phone.
What it cannot do: There is no platform sync with LinkedIn/E-Mail/Messengers and there are no AI functionalities (neither is currently planned). As of now there is no native iOS/Android app, using the page on mobile works fine for me so far.
Development and use of AI: This app is not vibe coded. I do use AI assistants for programming support but code is either authored or reviewed by me (which is definitely required). I used golang for the backend (such a great language), the frontend is react. After a PR on github E2E tests are run, for each tag docker containers are built and available.
Demo and links: You can try a demo here: https://meerkat-crm-demo.fly.dev/ (login with username demo and password test_12345). The demo starts on demand so it might take a couple seconds to load. Data is shared but resets as soon as the demo goes idle. Repository: https://github.com/fbuchner/meerkat-crm (the README has a screengrab to give you an impression)
I am an avid user of the app myself and excited to open it up to the community now. Please be kind, I’ve been working on this for quite a while but it is my first open source project at this scale.
There is an export button in the settings to export all data (aside from profile pictures) as CSV or export the contacts as VCF including profile pictures (but excluding activities and notes). Both of these methods allow for import into e.g. google contacts if you want to migrate away. In general all data is stored in an sqlite database on your file system as well as a folder for the profile photos.
//Edit: To migrate data into meerkat there is also an import assistant in the contact list page that allows for VCF or CSV import
Thank you - that sound good :)