Retiring the Self-Hosting Path — But Keeping the SDK Open
We're retiring the Docker self-hosting path for the VibePing dashboard. The SDK stays open-source and is being relicensed MIT. Here's the honest version of what's changing and why.
This post used to be a Docker self-hosting guide. If you landed here from a search result or an old bookmark looking for docker compose up instructions, I owe you a straight answer up front: the self-hostable VibePing dashboard is going away. What's not going away is the SDK — @vibeping/sdk stays public on GitHub and is being relicensed from AGPL-3.0 to MIT as part of v0.2.0.
I'm not going to dress this up. We changed direction — and then, after some honest conversations, we refined that direction again. Here's where we actually landed.
What's changing
The hosted dashboard, AI insights, alerts, funnel analysis, team features, and everything that runs at vibeping.dev are now proprietary and fully managed. There is no Docker Compose for the dashboard anymore. We're not writing new self-host docs, we're not answering Docker questions in support, and we're not keeping a compose file compatible with new releases.
The SDK is the other half of the story, and it's the part an earlier version of this post got wrong. @vibeping/sdk is not being archived. The GitHub repo at github.com/Vibeping/vibeping↗ stays public — it's the home of the SDK source, the examples, the schema docs, and the contributing guide. As of v0.2.0 it's MIT licensed. Install it from npm, read the source, fork it, ship it with your product. That part of VibePing is open, and we want it to stay that way.
So: the dashboard goes fully managed. The SDK stays open. One repo, two very different things, and we're being clearer about which is which.
Why the middle path
When I first wrote the "going fully managed" announcement, I framed it as open source was the problem. That wasn't quite right, and a few people who I trust called me on it.
The actual problem was never being open source. It was running a self-hostable dashboard alongside a managed cloud. Every engineering decision had to be made twice — once for our infrastructure, once for whatever the community was running on a random VPS. Every feature had to ship behind a config flag. Every migration had to be safe for databases we'd never see. Most of our support inbox was "my Docker container won't start" and "my reverse proxy is returning CORS errors" — hours that weren't going into the actual analytics, error tracking, or AI insights. And the open-source escape valve on the dashboard was cannibalizing the plan that funds the product.
None of those problems apply to the SDK. A 3.3KB script tag doesn't have a support burden. It doesn't have a migration story. It doesn't cannibalize a paid tier — if anything, an MIT-licensed SDK makes the product easier to adopt, easier to audit, and easier to trust. An open SDK helps the business. A self-hostable dashboard was fighting it.
So we split them. The dashboard goes fully managed. The SDK stays open, and moves to a license that's actually friendly to the people integrating it.
What you should do
If you're evaluating VibePing. Install @vibeping/sdk from npm — it's MIT, the source is on GitHub, you can read every line that runs in your users' browsers before you ship it. Then sign up at vibeping.dev↗ for the hosted dashboard. Same one-script-tag setup as before.
If you're running the old AGPL Docker stack. First: thank you. You were the people who validated this was worth building. AGPL-3.0 is irrevocable for code that's already been published, so your 0.1.x install is legally valid forever and nobody is taking that away. What you won't get from us going forward is patches, dependency updates, or support — if a CVE drops in an underlying library, you're on your own. When you're ready, migrate to the managed cloud. Same SDK, same data model, none of the maintenance.
If you're an SDK contributor. The repo stays public. The MIT relicense makes contribution simpler — no AGPL CLA gymnastics, no worries about what licensing implications your PR has. The contributing guide has been updated to reflect that the repo is now SDK-only; dashboard code is no longer part of the open tree.
What's staying the same
The things that made people pick VibePing in the first place are not changing.
Cookieless by default. No PII collected. GDPR-friendly out of the box. Our privacy stance was never about the license — it was about the architecture. Moving the dashboard to fully managed doesn't change a single line of what we collect or how.
The SDK is still 3.3KB. Still one script tag. Still a five-minute setup. And now MIT, so you can ship it anywhere without thinking twice.
The free tier stays generous: 10,000 events per month and one project, no credit card. That is not a trial — it's the free tier, and it's designed to actually be useful for a small project.
Thanks, and what's next
To everyone who starred the repo, filed an issue, submitted a PR, or spun up a Docker instance on a weekend to kick the tires: thank you. That feedback shaped what the managed product looks like today, and none of this would exist without it.
If you want the hosted dashboard, join the waitlist at vibeping.dev↗. If you want to read, fork, or contribute to the SDK, it's right where it's always been at github.com/Vibeping/vibeping↗ — now under MIT.
The SDK is open. The intelligence is hosted. That's the whole story.