Mission

Own your infrastructure and the monitoring that watches it

We believe everyone has the right to understand, monitor and control the infrastructure they depend on.

Websites, servers, applications and services all report on their health. They tell you whether things work, slow down or are about to fail.

We believe that information belongs to the people who operate those systems.

Understanding your own servers should not require an expensive subscription. Sensitive operational data should not have to go to another company's cloud. Your visibility should survive a vendor's price change, a discontinued product or a new paywall.

Monitoring should be a basic capability for the people who run systems. That's why we're building Checkmate.

What we believe

Keep your monitoring under your control

When you own or operate infrastructure, you should have complete visibility into its health and performance.

Your monitoring system should not become another dependency outside your control.

You should be able to deploy monitoring software on your own infrastructure, configure it for your needs and run it without a commercial provider.

You don't need a cloud account or an external service to view your own dashboard. You don't need permission to monitor the systems you operate.

Ownership should mean control.

Make privacy the default

Infrastructure monitoring can reveal sensitive details about an organization: its servers, network topology, applications, usage patterns and operational weaknesses.

That information deserves protection.

We believe monitoring data should remain under the control of the people who generate it.

Checkmate is designed for self-hosting, with monitoring data stored in your own database. You decide where it runs and which external services or integrations to use.

You can turn off optional telemetry. External integrations may communicate with third parties, so you choose whether to use them.

Your infrastructure should not have to become another company's dataset.

Make good monitoring accessible to everyone

Monitoring matters to a student running a small server as much as it matters to an enterprise managing thousands of machines.

Powerful monitoring tools are often expensive or complicated. Many are designed for large organizations with dedicated operations teams.

We believe this creates an unnecessary barrier.

A small business should be able to monitor its systems while controlling its costs. A developer should be able to see whether an application is healthy without assembling a complicated observability stack.

Checkmate aims to make capable infrastructure monitoring accessible, understandable and practical for everyone.

The open-source software sets no artificial limit on monitors and charges no per-server fee. It reserves no essential monitoring feature for paying customers.

Your budget should not decide how well you can understand your infrastructure.

Use open source to protect your independence

Publishing source code is important. We believe the deeper value of open source is independence.

You should be able to understand how your monitoring software works, inspect its behavior, modify it and contribute to its future.

You should be able to build on it without relying entirely on the priorities of one company.

Checkmate is developed openly under the AGPL-3.0 license. You can inspect, use, modify and redistribute its code under the terms of that license.

We welcome community contributions, criticism, new ideas and alternative approaches.

The project should improve because people choose to take part, with nothing locking them in.

Open source is how we distribute Checkmate and how we build trust.

Build monitoring that can outlast any vendor

Infrastructure often runs for years, sometimes for decades.

The software protecting it should be built with that in mind.

We've seen what happens when technology depends entirely on a commercial provider. Prices change, products are discontinued, companies are acquired and services disappear.

Users are left with difficult migrations, unexpected costs or systems they can no longer operate.

We believe monitoring should be designed for longevity.

Self-hosting, open-source code and portable configurations help users avoid depending entirely on one provider's continued existence.

No company can promise to exist forever. A project can be built so its users can carry on if the company behind it disappears.

The tools you rely on today should not become liabilities tomorrow.

How we pay for it

Keep the software free and the services optional

We believe sustainable open-source development and commercial success can coexist.

Building, maintaining, securing and improving software takes real work. Developers deserve to be paid. Projects need resources to survive.

Sustainability does not require restricting access to fundamental capabilities.

The monitoring software remains open source. Commercial services add convenience. You never pay for permission to monitor your own infrastructure.

Organizations may choose to pay for managed services, operational assistance, backups, integrations or other offerings that save them time and effort.

Those services should earn their place by delivering real value.

Choosing not to pay should not prevent you from operating your self-hosted monitoring system.

We want people to support Checkmate because they value what we build. We will not make leaving difficult.

Build with people who believe in the open internet

A company develops Checkmate. Developers, system administrators, homelab enthusiasts, infrastructure teams and contributors around the world shape it as an open-source project.

Some people contribute code. Others report bugs, improve documentation, suggest features or help new users get started.

However you take part, you help decide what Checkmate becomes.