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Dev.to
Dev.to
7/20/2026
I've Been Writing About Pingoni Like It's a Company. It's Not. It's just me, $0 MRR, and a lot of 2am debugging.

I've Been Writing About Pingoni Like It's a Company. It's Not. It's just me, $0 MRR, and a lot of 2am debugging.

Short summary

A third-year CS student in Edmonton shares a transparent update on Pingoni, his solo-built API monitoring tool for small Node and Python teams with LLM cost tracking. After 7 months, he has $0 MRR, 0 paying customers, and 1 signup. He admits to previously using corporate language ('we built this') and now embraces radical honesty as a marketing strategy, sharing a story about a bug that silently dropped all errors for three days.

  • Pingoni: drop-in API monitoring with LLM cost tracking, built solo by a CS student over 7 months — $0 MRR, 1 signup
  • Founder pivoted from corporate 'we' language to radical transparency, finding honesty drives more engagement than polished copy
  • Product includes stack traces and per-user OpenAI cost tracking; pricing is free for 10k requests/month, $9/month after

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