I just open sourced my personal project for tracking relationships. It’s like a CRM but for people you actually care about, not sales leads.
The problem: We all have hundreds of contacts scattered everywhere, but can we remember when we last talked to an old friend? Their birthday? How we met them?
The solution: Nametag helps you track people, map how they’re connected, and visualize your network as an interactive graph.
Features:
- Track people with flexible attributes (birthdays, contact info, notes)
- Map relationships (family, friends, colleagues, custom types)
- Network graph visualization showing how everyone connects
- Custom groups for organizing contacts
- Birthday and contact reminders
- Dark mode, internationalization (EN/ES)
- Mobile-responsive
Tech stack:
- Next.js 16 with TypeScript
- PostgreSQL + Prisma ORM
- D3.js for graph visualization
- Redis for rate limiting
- Tailwind CSS
- Docker Compose deployment
Why AGPL-3.0?
I chose AGPL instead of MIT/Apache because I want to ensure that if someone modifies and deploys Nametag (especially as a hosted service), they have to contribute their improvements back to the community. Personal relationship data is sensitive - users should always have the right to inspect and modify the code handling their data.
Dual model:
- Hosted SaaS: https://nametag.one/ (free tier: 50 people, paid from $1/month) - sustains development
- Self-hosted: Unlimited contacts, complete data ownership, free forever
The SaaS helps fund development, but self-hosting is a first-class citizen with no compromises. Auto-verified accounts, no email service required, works completely offline.
Contributing:
Looking for contributors! Areas where help would be awesome:
- Additional language translations (currently EN/ES)
- Graph visualization improvements (performance with 500+ nodes)
- Mobile app (Native would be great, but also open to React Native or similar)
- Export/import formats (vCard, CSV, etc.)
- Documentation improvements
GitHub: https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag
I’d be happy to hear any suggestions you might have. Have a nice day!
We all have hundreds of contacts
What? Really? Can’t relate.
I have over 800 and I’m not even a salesperson or anything like that; that’s mostly from exchanged emails over the years
“Here’s my email” isn’t any kind of a relationship though. 800+ contacts means you need to go through and delete unnecessary/unused contacts. Of which there are hundreds.
of course most are not used, that is fine, I don’t understand why anyone would bother deleting “unused” contacts
My reply definitely seems more rude than I meant it, upon re-reading. Apologies! To each their own. I think the thought of having 800+ contacts just seems overwhelming and cluttered to me. I’d go crazy if I had that many lol
no problem. I can see that, at the same time, the directory of the place I work at has 20x that number and finding someone is never an issue, so I also don’t bother cleaning up my local list.
I have about 8, and it’s too much.
Looks nice, thanks! I’ve had my eye on Monica for a while but always bounced off it rather than bothering to add MySQL to my stack, so I appreciate you’re picking postgres. What other differentiations from Monica would you highlight?
Thank you!
Monica is where I started at. I was really hoping that it would cover my needs, but after some time of using it I found it too complex for what I really needed. Also, I was missing the network graph, which might be useful or not, but it’s fun :)
Also, when I tried self-hosting it I found a lot of problems when trying to make it work, and at the end I gave up. It feels like the project is a bit outdated.
Honestly, what I wanted is Monica to cover my needs, so I didn’t have to start an alternative, but here we are 😆
