About melonfleet
melonfleet is a hobby workshop for a federated suite of self-hostable IT and help-desk tools — monitoring, inventory, ticketing, printers, macOS patching, and more — that can run alone or grow together under one mothership.
The short version
By day, the person behind melonfleet keeps fleets running — Macs, printers, the usual IT grind. By night, those same problems get re-approached for fun: what would a small-business / school stack look like if you built it from scratch, kept it self-hosted, and owed nothing to the enterprise vendor catalogue?
A suite, not a single app
Enterprise IT stacks are usually one expensive platform or a pile of unrelated tools that never talk. melonfleet takes the middle path: each product is a focused tool (help desk, infra monitoring, asset inventory, firewall change workflow, printer fleet, macOS patches, local containers), and Orchard can adopt them as Docker add-ons with shared SSO and an event bus. A VineWatch host-down or InkWarden toner fault can become a CareGrove ticket without copy-paste.
That’s the pitch against the usual suspects — PRTG / SolarWinds for monitoring, Lansweeper for assets, ServiceNow / Zendesk for tickets — at a scale and price that fits a small shop, not a Fortune 500 RFP.
Built with AI, on purpose
Every melonfleet tool is designed and written hand-in-hand with an AI assistant. That’s half the point — an ongoing experiment in how far one curious person and a capable pair-programmer can get. Architecture, code, branding, even this page: worked out in conversation.
The ethos
Self-hosted first. Independent. No lock-in, free defaults, and software you run on hardware you actually own. Nothing here phones home to a cloud you didn’t choose. It’s built the way a home cook tends a garden — for the pleasure of it, and because the shop-bought version wasn’t quite right.
Nothing serious
melonfleet isn’t a company and nothing here is for sale. It’s a playground. If a tool turns out useful to you too — wonderful, that’s a bonus. For now, it’s for the joy of making things.