Rebuilding Monica: Why We're Starting Over After 10 Years
We Are Rebuilding Monica
Monica, the open-source personal CRM with over 25,000 GitHub stars, is being rebuilt from scratch. Founder Regis Freyd reflects on a decade of accumulated decisions and shifting perspectives, explaining why the current version no longer fits his vision. The new v3 will treat relationships as first-class concepts, offer deep customization, and maintain its commitment to privacy and self-hosting. This article kicks off a series documenting the rebuild's challenges and decisions.
Your life shouldn't have to fit the database schema we decided was right for everyone.
- mtlynch
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well:
> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.
My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model.
If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings.
I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling featu […]
- cheschire
I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.”
I’ve become so cynical this year.
- joewils
I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- jvanderbot
I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development.
For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs.
If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...
- tikimcfee
After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."
That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.
I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".
And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.
/rant