How does the AWS cost widget work?

The AWS widget reads your current month's cost from the AWS Console billing page. Keep the AWS Console open in any tab, and Pinodock extracts the cost figure using a content script. No AWS credentials are stored — the extension reads what is already visible on your screen. The region badge is read from the Console header.

Can I add my own SaaS metrics to the new tab dashboard?

Yes. Pinodock's custom widget builder lets you connect to any JSON API. Enter your API endpoint, add request headers (for authentication), and define which fields to display. If your SaaS backend exposes an MRR or user count endpoint, you can show those numbers on your new tab with threshold colors — green below a churn threshold, red above an AWS cost ceiling.

Is the Uptime Monitor a replacement for dedicated monitoring tools like Pingdom?

No — it's a supplement. The Pinodock Uptime Monitor runs in your browser, checks reachability from your network, and has no alerting or historical uptime tracking. Dedicated tools like Pingdom, Better Uptime, or Uptime Robot monitor from multiple global regions, store history, and send alerts. Use Pinodock for ambient awareness during your workday; use a dedicated tool for on-call alerting.

The Indie Hacker Dashboard: Uptime, Revenue, and Priorities on Every New Tab

Solo founders and small teams don't have an ops team watching the dashboards. They are the ops team — and the sales team, and the support team. This guide shows how to build a new tab that answers the three questions that matter most at the start of every work session: is the product up, is the spend under control, and what needs to happen today?

The founder layout

A founder's dashboard prioritises signal over aesthetics. The top of the grid should show the things that would ruin your day if they went wrong unnoticed; the bottom should show the things that drive the week forward.

Top row — health	Bottom row — momentum
Uptime Monitor	GitHub Repo
AWS Console (cost)	Markets
Custom SaaS metrics widget	Todoist
	RSS (indie hacker news)

Uptime Monitor — is the product alive?

The first thing any founder should see on a new tab is whether the product is responding. The Uptime Monitor widget sends a HEAD request to each URL you configure and shows a coloured dot and response time:

🟢 Under 500ms — healthy
🟡 500ms–1000ms — slow (amber response time label)
🔴 Timeout or error — down

For a typical SaaS product, monitor at least three endpoints:

Endpoint	Why monitor it
Your marketing site root	First thing customers see — must always be up
Your app login page	Confirms the app server is running and responding
`/health` or `/api/ping`	Checks your API layer specifically
Your payment/checkout page	Checkout being down is revenue down

Remember: this monitors from your browser on your network. It catches "the server is down" but not "the CDN is serving a cached version to users in a different region." Use it as a quick ambient check alongside a dedicated monitoring tool for production alerting.

AWS cost — is the spend sane?

The AWS widget reads your current month's cost directly from the AWS Billing Console — no API credentials required. Keep the AWS Console open in any tab and Pinodock reads the cost figure from the billing summary page.

The cost number is colour-coded based on thresholds you can observe:

Orange (default) — normal AWS orange branding
Amber — cost above $50 this month
Red — cost above $200 this month

For a bootstrapped product, having the AWS bill visible on every new tab is one of the cheapest forms of cost discipline. The moment something starts scaling unexpectedly — a misconfigured Lambda in a loop, an S3 lifecycle policy missing — the number turns amber before the month-end invoice arrives.

GitHub — is the codebase moving?

The GitHub Repo widget shows stars, forks, open issues, and the three most recent open pull requests for your main repository. For solo founders, this is less about monitoring others' activity and more about staying honest about your own:

A growing star count is social proof momentum — visible at a glance
Open issue count creeping up signals support debt accumulating
Open PRs stalling is a sign that shipping has slowed

The GitHub notification widget (separate from the Repo widget) shows your unread notification count — PRs from contractors, issues from users, security alerts. Keep both: the Repo widget for your project's health, the notification widget for your inbox.

Markets — what's the macro doing?

For founders who raised funding, hold options, or work in crypto-adjacent products, market prices are a relevant business input — not just investment entertainment. The Markets widget shows live prices and 21-day sparklines for any stock ticker or crypto symbol.

Common configurations for founders:

Bootstrapped SaaS founder: BTC,ETH — crypto is often where bootstrapped savings go
VC-backed founder: the benchmark index SPY plus your investor's publicly traded portfolio companies
Crypto product builder: BTC,ETH,SOL — your users' purchasing power directly

Todoist — what's the one thing today?

A solo founder has a hundred things competing for attention. The Todoist widget forces simplicity by showing only today's due tasks — not the entire project backlog. The discipline of deciding the night before what goes on today's list, and seeing only that list on every new tab, prevents the trap of optimising busy work over the thing that actually moves the needle.

The one-task rule: Try limiting yourself to one high-priority task per morning work block. Put it first in Todoist. The Pinodock widget shows it at the top of the list every time you open a tab. If you close a tab and your task is still there, it's a gentle reminder that you're browsing instead of shipping.

Custom widget — your own SaaS metrics

Pinodock's custom widget builder lets you connect to any JSON API and display the result on your new tab. If your product exposes metrics via an API — MRR, active users, trial signups, churn events — you can show those numbers directly.

To set it up: open the Widget Builder from Settings → Widgets → New Widget, choose Fetch mode, enter your API endpoint, add any required authentication headers, and define which JSON fields to extract. The widget supports:

Nested JSON path extraction (e.g. data.metrics.mrr)
Currency formatting transform
Threshold colors (green below target, red above ceiling)
Sparkline template for time-series arrays
Auto-refresh interval in minutes

A custom MRR widget with a green-at-target threshold is the closest thing to a revenue ticker on your new tab without building a separate internal dashboard.

RSS feeds for indie hacker community

The RSS widget supports multiple feeds simultaneously. Useful feeds for indie hackers and founders:

Feed	URL
Hacker News best	`https://hnrss.org/best`
IndieHackers	`https://www.indiehackers.com/feed.rss`
Lobsters	`https://lobste.rs/rss`
Product Hunt top	`https://www.producthunt.com/feed`

Enter these URLs (one per line) in the RSS widget settings. Items from all feeds are merged by recency into a single list, so you get a cross-feed view of what's relevant without opening four separate tabs.

The best founder dashboard is one you barely notice — it stays in the background, confirms things are fine, and surfaces a problem the moment it appears. Build this once and it runs silently every day. The day it shows a red uptime check at 9am is the day it pays for every minute spent setting it up.

→ Build a custom SaaS metrics widget

→ The developer dashboard setup

→ The complete Pinodock guide