Slip into Slipwire

I’ve been doing software and infra work for a long time. I worked at Heroku back when git push heroku main felt like magic. That experience always kind of stuck with me.

These days I spend a good amount of time in my homelab. Proxmox, Tailscale, random mini PCs, too many Docker containers. I genuinely enjoy this stuff. There’s something satisfying about running your own services, owning your data, not depending on some company that might enshittify their product next quarter.

And lets be real, the cloud isn’t what it used to be. Prices keep creeping up. Services get deprecated with little warning. Companies get acquired and suddenly your workflow is someone else’s roadmap. I’ve watched enough “sunsetting” announcements to know that building on someone else’s platform means you’re always one email away from scrambling.

More people are waking up to this. The self-hosting community has exploded, and the tools have gotten really good. But there’s a gap. What works for a homelab doesn’t work for a 15-person business with employees who can’t SSH into anything and an owner who just wants stuff to work. Small businesses are still overpaying for cloud storage they don’t need. IT shops are still duct-taping together client setups one at a time. Not because self-hosting is impossible, but because the tooling assumes you’re either an enterprise or a hobbyist.

Nothing in between.

If you’re managing IT for multiple clients, it’s even worse. Every deployment is a snowflake. There’s no fleet view, no central dashboard, no way to repeat what worked. I kept thinking about how Heroku made deployment feel effortless. What if self-hosted infrastructure could feel like that for the people managing it?

So I built Slipwire.

It’s a dashboard for managing self-hosted deployments across multiple servers. You add a machine, run an install script, and then deploy apps with a click. Tailscale handles the networking automatically so you’re not dealing with port forwarding or VPNs or any of that nonsense. I’m building it primarily for IT service providers who manage infrastructure for small businesses. They’ve got multiple clients, each needing file storage or password management or backups, and right now every deployment is a custom job. Slipwire makes it repeatable.

But honestly it works just as well if you’re running a small agency or consultancy and want to manage your own servers without the cloud bills and lock-in. Same tool, different use case.

If any of that sounds useful, try it out. 14 day trial.

And if you hit bugs or have ideas, email me, I’ll get back to you.