I’ve been using various contact managers but they all feel like sales tools, so I built Nametag to track the people I actually care about - friends, family, colleagues. It maps relationships, tracks birthdays, and visualizes your network as an interactive graph.
Self-hosting highlights:
- Docker Compose setup - PostgreSQL, Redis, Next.js app. One command to start
- No email service needed - Accounts auto-verify, works completely offline
- Unlimited contacts - No artificial limits (hosted version caps free tier at 50)
- Complete data ownership - Your relationship data stays on your infrastructure
- Optional email - Can configure Resend if you want birthday/reminder emails
- No phone-home - Runs entirely on your network if you want
- AGPL-3.0 licensed - Full source access
Features:
- Track people with flexible attributes (name, birthday, contact info, notes)
- Map relationships between people (family, friends, colleagues, custom types)
- Interactive D3.js network graph visualization
- Custom groups for organizing contacts
- Birthday reminders (if you configure email)
- Dark mode, i18n (English and Spanish for now, but more are coming)
- Mobile-responsive
Tech stack:
- Next.js 16 (TypeScript)
- PostgreSQL + Prisma ORM
- Redis for rate limiting
- D3.js for graph visualization
- Tailwind CSS
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag
cd nametag
# Edit .env with your secrets
docker-compose up -d
Database migrations run automatically on first start.
Access at localhost:3000.
There’s also a hosted version at https://nametag.one/ if you don’t want to self-host (helps fund development).
GitHub: https://github.com/mattogodoy/nametag
Happy to answer questions about the setup, architecture, or deployment!
No reason this should need a server.
Couldn’t the same be said for just about any self-hosted app? You can watch video files with a local video player, so no need for Jellyfin; you can save passwords in KeePass, so no need for Vaultwarden; etc.
Seems to me like, if you’d like to have access to this app along with your data from any computer without having to overlay a separate data syncing solution and install a local app on each of those computers, that’s justification enough. Or maybe I’m just not understanding your critique here…
It’s not Minecraft. My contacts list is not multiplayer.
It’s not a video file. How many terabytes do you think my contacts list is?
How many people do you think are getting a server before getting a file sync app?
Not many… but this community isn’t for those people. It’s for people who are already predisposed to self-hosting software.
That don’t mean we install every slop app in the whole repo.
But I have multiple devices and want to access it from all of them.
That don’t need a server.
Tools like these are used collaboratively by many people for various reasons. Someone in this thread said they’d use it to manage people in work projects, for instance.
Great, it was not clear from the post.