Reviving the Open Web.
7 dead internet products. 1 unified platform. Powered by AI.
Between 2013 and 2021, Big Tech killed nearly every great open-web tool. Hundreds of millions of users were left orphaned. Nothing was built to replace them — until now.
The Open Web Was Murdered.
Between July 2013 and May 2021, the internet quietly lost its most beloved community tools. Google shut down Reader. Yahoo killed Pipes, Answers, and their Directory. Delicious died and was buried. iGoogle vanished. DMOZ — the human-curated directory that ran for 19 years — was bulldozed.
These weren't failed products. They had hundreds of millions of active users. Google Reader had 30 million subscribers when it died. Yahoo Answers had 200 million. Delicious had 5.3 million. DMOZ had 92,000 volunteer editors maintaining 5 million sites. They were killed because they didn't fit a quarterly ad-revenue spreadsheet — not because users stopped wanting them.
And nothing replaced them. Nothing. A decade later, RSS subscribers still beg for a Google Reader clone. Question-and-answer sites are overrun by spam and SEO farms. Web directories are extinct. Hosted website monitoring costs $15-100/month per site. The open web's plumbing was ripped out and never re-installed.
SENTINEL is the re-installation.
⚰️ The Graveyard of the Open Web
Every product we revived, when it died, and who it left behind.
📰 Google Reader
2005 → killed July 1, 2013 · 8 years old
The web's universal RSS aggregator. 30 million+ active users at death. Google killed it citing "declining usage" while subscriber counts were still growing. RSS subscriptions have grown 34% per year since the murder. Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur exist but none replicate Google Reader's clean simplicity — and none use AI. SENTINEL Reader is what Google Reader would have become.
⚡ Yahoo Pipes
2007 → killed September 30, 2015 · 8 years old
The original visual no-code automation builder, before Zapier existed. 90,000+ active pipes at shutdown. Let anyone connect feeds, transform data, and build mashups in a browser. When Yahoo killed it the entire no-code-automation category died for 5 years. Zapier filled the gap but is closed-source and expensive. SENTINEL Pipes brings back open, visual, free workflow automation on n8n.
❓ Yahoo Answers
2005 → killed May 4, 2021 · 16 years old
The internet's biggest open Q&A platform. 200 million+ users. The Internet Archive preserved a 4.75 TB dump of every question and answer ever asked. When Yahoo pulled the plug, Quora became a paywall and Stack Exchange covers only narrow technical topics. The general open Q&A web is empty. SENTINEL Q&A is the AI-augmented replacement: ask anything, AI answers instantly, humans add expertise.
🌐 DMOZ / Open Directory Project
1998 → killed March 17, 2017 · 19 years old
The Open Directory Project. 5 million sites, 92,000 volunteer editors, 1 million categories. The largest human-edited web directory ever built — used by Google, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, and every major search engine for 19 years to bootstrap their rankings. AOL silently killed it in 2017. The complete RDF dump still exists. SENTINEL Directory is rebuilt on top of DMOZ data with AI-powered category suggestions and modern moderation.
🌐 Yahoo Directory
1994 → killed December 31, 2014 · 20 years old
The original Yahoo. Before Yahoo was a portal, it was Jerry and David's hand-curated directory of websites — the very first navigation layer of the World Wide Web. By the time Marissa Mayer killed it, the directory cost $299 per submission. SEO professionals still mourn it: a Yahoo Directory listing carried more authority than any backlink today. SENTINEL Directory restores curated web discovery — free, AI-assisted, human-verified.
🔖 Delicious
2003 → murdered repeatedly until 2017 · 14 years of slow death
The original social bookmarking site. 5.3 million users at peak. Yahoo bought it in 2005, neglected it, sold it to AVOS in 2011, who sold it to Science Inc in 2014, who sold it to Pinboard in 2017 — Pinboard's sole purpose for the acquisition was to kill it. Pocket got Mozilla'd to death. Raindrop is closed-source. SENTINEL Bookmarks is open social bookmarking with AI tagging.
⬡ iGoogle
2005 → killed November 1, 2013 · 8 years old
Personalized homepage with widgets — weather, news, calendar, RSS, Gmail preview, stock tickers — all on one customizable dashboard. Tens of millions of daily users. Google killed it citing "modern apps" but no replacement ever delivered the same one-glance overview. Netvibes survives but feels frozen in 2010. SENTINEL Dashboard is iGoogle done right: every module on one screen, AI-prioritized.
🟢 Uptime Kuma — never killed, never hosted
2021 → present · open source, 62,000+ GitHub stars
The best open-source uptime monitor in the world. Self-hostable, beautiful, free. But nobody offers a hosted version. Pingdom charges $15/month, UptimeRobot's free tier is severely capped, StatusCake is enterprise-priced. There is a massive gap for "Uptime Kuma but you don't have to run a server." SENTINEL Monitor fills it.
💰 The Market Nobody Built
Each killed product represents an unfilled market. We're not guessing — these are real, documented, recurring revenue opportunities:
| Module | Revenue Potential | Why It Exists |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted Uptime Kuma | $2K – $10K /mo | 62K stars, zero hosted offering |
| Hosted RSS Reader | $5K – $20K /mo | Google Reader killed 2013, RSS growing 34%/yr |
| AI-Curated Web Directory | $5K – $20K /mo | Yahoo + DMOZ killed, Google quality declining |
| AI Q&A Platform | $10K – $50K /mo | Yahoo Answers killed 2021, 4.75 TB free training data |
| Yahoo Pipes Revival (n8n-based) | $5K – $50K /mo | Killed 2015, nothing replaced it for the open web |
| Social Bookmarking | $2K – $10K /mo | Delicious dead, Pocket dying, Raindrop closed |
| Personal Dashboard / Widgets | $2K – $10K /mo | iGoogle killed 2013, Netvibes stagnant |
| SENTINEL — all 7 unified | $31K – $170K /mo | Combined moat = unstoppable |
Combined potential: $372K – $2M annual recurring revenue at maturity, with most infrastructure already built and 7 cross-module network effects.
🧩 What We Built
Each module is production-ready and live. Click any one to use it free.
🟢 Monitor — Website Uptime
Watch any website. 5-minute health checks (1-minute on Pro). Status tracking, uptime percentage, response time, instant down/up alerts via email or webhook. The hosted Uptime Kuma replacement. Free: 5 monitors. Pro: 100.
→ Try /monitor
📰 Reader — AI RSS
Add any RSS or Atom feed. We fetch, parse, store, and run every article through an AI summarizer (Qwen 14B locally) so you can read 100 articles in 10 minutes. Smart filters, OPML import/export, full-text search. Free: 25 feeds. Pro: 500.
→ Try /reader
🌐 Directory — Curated Web
Hand-curated, AI-assisted. Submit any site, get categorized, get discovered. The open replacement for DMOZ (5M sites in our seed dataset) and Yahoo Directory. Search, browse by category, vote, share. Powered by full-text Postgres search. Free submissions, no $299 fee.
→ Try /directory
❓ Q&A — Ask Anything
Ask any question. Our AI (Qwen 14B running locally on owned GPUs) generates an instant answer. Then humans add expertise. Voting, best-answer marking, categories, view counts. The Yahoo Answers replacement, augmented with modern LLMs. Free: 10 questions/mo. Pro: 500.
→ Try /qa
⚡ Pipes — No-Code Automation
Build pipes that connect modules. "When my monitor goes down, send me an email." "Every morning, email me a digest of new RSS articles." "When a new question is asked, generate an AI answer." Pre-built recipes + custom builder. The Yahoo Pipes successor. Free: 3 pipes. Pro: 50.
→ Try /pipes
🔖 Bookmarks — Save & Tag
Save any URL with tags. Public or private. Tag clouds, full-text search, browser-extension import (coming), auto-title detection. Cross-posts optionally to the directory. The Delicious replacement. Free: 100 bookmarks. Pro: unlimited.
→ Try /bookmarks
⬡ Dashboard — Your Command Center
All 7 modules on one personalized screen. Real-time monitor status, recent bookmarks, hot questions, latest articles, your pipes, your stats. The iGoogle revival, AI-prioritized. Customizable widgets, drag-to-reorder (coming).
→ Try /dashboard
🚀 Launch — Submit Your Startup
Free product listing. Tagline, description, screenshots, category. Visitors upvote. Today's launches go to the homepage. Bonus: every approved launch is auto-cross-posted to the SENTINEL Directory. The Product Hunt of the open web.
→ Try /launch
🧠 Why SENTINEL Wins
1. Network effects across 7 modules
Every module makes every other better. Submit a site → it appears in the directory. Save a bookmark → it can become a directory entry. Subscribe to a feed → its articles can be auto-bookmarked. Ask a question → AI answers using our directory + bookmarks as context. Each new user creates value for every other user across 7 surfaces.
2. AI-native, not AI-bolted-on
Every module uses local LLMs (Qwen 2.5 14B, Llama 3) running on our own GPUs. No OpenAI API costs. No rate limits. No data leaving our servers. AI summarizes articles, answers questions, suggests categories, detects spam, classifies bookmarks — all locally, all free.
3. Owned infrastructure, zero rent-seeking
64-core Xeon Gold server, 383 GB RAM, multiple TB of SSD. PostgreSQL with pgvector + Apache AGE. Self-hosted Ollama, Elasticsearch, Qdrant, Searxng, n8n. We don't pay AWS. We don't pay OpenAI. We don't pay Vercel. Our marginal cost per user is near zero. Big tech can't beat us on price.
4. Massive seed datasets we already own
DMOZ complete dump (5M sites, ready to ingest), Yahoo Answers Wayback dump (4.75 TB), Stack Exchange dump (23M Q&A), Wikipedia, Wikidata, Common Crawl segments. We don't start from zero on launch day — we start from millions of pre-seeded entries.
5. No tracking. No ads on free tier. Open by default.
Zero analytics scripts. Zero ad networks. Zero data resale. Free accounts get the full product, just with usage caps. We make money from people who get serious value and upgrade — not from selling attention.
6. Replaces 7 paid tools you already use
Pingdom $15/mo + Feedly $8 + Zapier $20-600 + Pocket $5 + Raindrop $3 + Quora+ $7 + Notion widgets $10 = $68 to $648 per month. SENTINEL Pro: $49. One bill, one login, one dashboard.
📊 Real Numbers (Live, Right Now)
Pulled live from our database every page load. No vapor metrics.
🏗️ Built On Production-Grade Open Source
Python 3.10 + FastAPI
PostgreSQL 14 + pgvector + Apache AGE
Redis, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
Ollama (local inference)
Qwen 2.5 14B, Llama 3 8B
Sentence-transformers embeddings
n8n (Pipes engine)
Apache NiFi (data flows)
Playwright + browser-use
Postgres FTS + tsvector
SearxNG metasearch
Heritrix crawler
Dell R640, 64-core Xeon Gold, 383 GB RAM
Multi-TB NVMe SSD
Self-hosted, owned, on-premise
Monit watchdog
Systemd staggered boot
UFW + iptables hardened
Stop paying for 7 tools. Start using one.
Free forever for personal use. No tracking. No ads on free. No credit card to start.