I built a self-hosted alternative to Marker.io - here's how it works under the hood

The problem If you've ever freelanced, you know the feedback loop from hell. Your client opens the staging site, takes a screenshot, draws a red circle in WhatsApp, and sends you: "the thing on the left is weird." You reply: "Which page? Which element? What screen size?" Three days of back-and-forth later, you finally understand they wanted 2px more padding on a button. Tools like Marker.io and BugHerd solve this — clients annotate directly on the page. But they start at $39-42/month, your feedback data lives on their servers, and annotations are screenshot-based, meaning they break when the layout changes. I wanted something self-hosted, open-source, and smarter about how it anchors annotations. So I built SitePing . What is SitePing? A drop-in feedback widget (~23KB gzipped) that your clients use to draw rectangles on the live site, categorize their feedback (bug, change request, question), and submit it. Everything goes to your own database . Try the live demo — draw annotations rig