Night Owl: Cheaper Laravel Monitoring — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] you an interesting alternative to Laravel Nightwatch called Night Owl, which is positioned to have self-hosted monitoring for Laravel apps. It's not exactly self-hosted and it's nuanced, but also I see the trend that developers

[00:16] and companies are trying to save money with having alternatives, sometimes internally, sometimes cheaper alternatives to popular SaaS solutions. And Night Owl seems to be one of them. Disclaimer, this is a sponsored video by

[00:31] Night Owl, so I do accept sponsors on the channel now if I believe in their mission or if I use the tools myself. And this example is pretty interesting because it may help you think of your own different solutions for different

[00:47] own different solutions for different areas, how to potentially save money. So how exactly Night Owl works that makes it cheaper from $5 per month versus $20 per month on Nightwatch if you run out of free credits, free events. And the

[01:02] mechanism is pretty interesting. So Night Owl does use Nightwatch under the hood, so you can see the link here. And Nightwatch actually consists of two things, open-source Laravel Nightwatch package and then Nightwatch web with all

[01:19] the infrastructure to store the data and show the reporting and the dashboards, right? So what Night Owl does, it uses Nightwatch package, free open-source, under the hood, and then stores the data in your own PostgreSQL database. By

[01:35] saying your own, here's what it means. Here's the screenshot that I made while registering. So when you create a project in Night Owl, you choose Supabase Postgres or Neon Postgres. Basically, you have your own Supabase

[01:49] account, then you give the access to Night Owl to connect to that database, and now you have basically two applications, Nightowl and Superbase. applications, Nightowl and Superbase. And by default, Superbase is free with

[02:03] very limited amount of data, but that may be enough for small and hobby projects. And then the pricing of Nightowl gives you $5 per month and your Superbase, which is free by default. And again, for small projects, that may be

[02:19] enough. So, I've tried it out myself. This is my AI Coding Daily website on Superbase. So, I have the database in table editor. You can see the amount of data and also in the section of usage, you can see that I'm on free plan and

[02:34] you can see that I'm on free plan and using 8% of the free 500 max of Superbase. So, conceptually, for small project, it does work. I've tried. But, of course, it's nuanced. So, AI Coding Daily, I can show you the numbers. I'm

[02:48] using Matomo tool for analytics. It's kind of like Google Analytics, but local hosted. So, it gets like 100 visits per day on average, roughly. So, I would call it a very small project. My YouTube channel with videos gets many more

[03:01] visitors about AI coding than the website. And on Laravel Nightwatch that I use for that AI Coding Daily, I can show you the usage of Nightwatch. So, this is my dashboard of Nightwatch. And by the way, you can use Nightowl and

[03:14] Nightwatch simultaneously at the same time, which is exactly what I did. And the event usage for AI Coding Daily for part of the month is 170 8,000 events.

[03:26] And I will be out of free plan. So, technically, I could be on free plan, technically, I could be on free plan, but 300K events per month. So, if I multiply that by roughly three, which is 1/3 of the month currently calculated,

[03:40] it will be like 500K and not 300K. So, it's over the free limit. So, even on that smaller project, you are out of free plan of Nightwatch. And the next free plan of Nightwatch. And the next pro plan starts with $20 per month. So,

[03:54] for similar size and hobby projects, again, that model of Night Owl may help you save money. It actually reminds me of a recent video I published on this channel about Laravel Cloud, so I received invoice. So, for smaller and

[04:08] hobby projects, $5 per month. Now, on Laravel Cloud, you can store even multiple projects on the same account with under $5 if you don't get much traffic. So, that Night Owl approach reminds me of exactly that. And I'll

[04:23] the description below if you haven't seen that one. But, of course, as I mentioned, the actual truth is more nuanced. To keep the price low, this is the documentation of Night Owl, there are a few kind of tricks that you need

[04:37] to implement. The first thing is set retention to two days. This is what they suggest. So, in one of the steps, they specifically suggest to have retention days two, which means you don't have events from 3 days ago. If you need

[04:53] into bigger number. And also, they suggest daily command to prune the events, keeping the database small. And, of course, that will not be a good fit if you do want the retention to be higher than 2 days. Of course, 2 days is

[05:09] just a suggested number. Maybe it could be bigger. It depends on your project. But, this is their official recommendation. And another catch is that on free plan of Superbase, it's shared and slow. So, at some point, the

[05:22] dashboards of Night Owl may start loading slower just because you're on a shown Night Owl in action. I'm discussing prices, but this is how it looks. So, after I installed and configured everything, doesn't it feel

[05:37] similar to Night Watch? And this is a zoomed-in version. If I zoom out to 100%, this is how it looks. And compare that to Night Watch. Like, do you see a lot of differences? I don't personally. And this is, to be honest, on the edge

[05:52] of terms and conditions. I'm not actually sure, I will be honest with you, as usual, even on promoted and paid videos, I'm trying to be unbiased and honest reviewer. So, I'm not entirely sure if Night Owl isn't violating any

[06:06] terms and conditions or just general guidelines of Nightwatch. They're using the same package, and even in the documentation of Night Owl, some of instructions related to sampling, for example, it's nightwatch.env

[06:20] variables. So, I think there's a gray area here. But, if legally all is fine, then that dashboard will give you roughly similar functionality, at least roughly similar functionality, at least from what I saw to Nightwatch, with data

[06:34] stored separately on your Supabase or Neon Postgres. So, that's why I called it interesting model for infrastructure to, after all, save money. But, of course, the caveat is that the price may grow. If your project grows, then you

[06:49] will probably get to the team plan of Night Owl, which is $15 per month, still cheaper than Nightwatch. But, then the Supabase, for example, from this dashboard, if I go to Supabase plan and check that out, it starts with $25 per

[07:05] check that out, it starts with $25 per month, which gets you 8 GB of disk size per project, which will allow you to have retention days much bigger than two, and maybe even store a few projects within the same database. I'm not sure

[07:18] how that would work. But, still, then basically you need to calculate whether it's still cheaper for you or not. And this is, by the way, what the author, the owner of Night Owl, says when I tweeted about that tool, asking the

[07:31] audience and received 86 likes. So, I think that people liked the idea, and think that people liked the idea, and then this is the owner, which shared the story of the reason of the Night Owl, built for a problem, six engineers, and

[07:44] and for them $20 Nightwatch plan just wasn't enough. So, this was kind of solution for themselves, which then turned into a product. So, I like the whole story. That's why I agreed to shoot this video on this channel as a

[07:57] promoted video. Again, I will be honest, but so many stories of developers start with their own problem. They solve it for themselves and then think maybe it can turn into a product for others or maybe even a business. So, we'll see

[08:12] what will happen with Nightowl, but from the short time that I've tested, it does look very competitive and it does work. However, the installation isn't that simple, so Nightwatch has first-party advantage. So, to enable Nightwatch, you

[08:28] basically just go to Laravel Forge and in this case, for example, for AI coding daily, there's a button enable monitoring with Nightwatch and it will configure that automatically. In case of Nightowl, I had to spend roughly 1 hour

[08:42] at first to understand how it works, then create Superbase account and configure that, then configure the connection, then install agent, and then run that agent on production server with

[08:56] this as a daemon, which now on Forge looks like this. So, Laravel Nightwatch was started by basically clicking a button and Nightowl, I had to dig a bit deeper into manual stuff, especially since I wanted to run them both

[09:10] simultaneously. So, this is kind of the price that you pay for cheaper price in the very beginning, but then you need to work some more manually. So, this is, for example, one of the screenshots that I needed to debug, screenshot from Flare

[09:23] that something was in conflict with Nightwatch with 98 occurrences. So, basically, it just didn't work for a while until I found in the docs a separate section called running alongside Nightwatch. So, I had to add a

[09:38] few more things to .env to make it work. So, yeah, it took roughly an hour, but as you can see, now it's working well. So, you can check out Night Owl at usenightowl.com, but this video is partially not that

[09:51] much about Night Owl, but more about the future of what we could build. Because I noticed in 2026 in the AI era, now we can build almost anything, right? But

[10:03] then the more important question becomes what do we build? If you have ideas for side projects for yourself, that's cool, but if you want to earn money from product, what ideas do you come up with? And one of the ways is to look at

[10:17] various existing SaaS solutions, big solutions, first-party solutions, and come up with some kind of twist. Twist for pricing, twist for model, some kind of fork of the solution, some kind of smaller audience or smaller feature of

[10:32] that. So, I hope this product as a concept would give you some new ideas for your projects that I hope to show on my channel in the future. What do you think about Night Owl? Do you approve the concept? And what do you think about

[10:46] its future alongside Nightwatch? Let's discuss in the comments below. That's it for this time, and see you guys in other videos.