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Fully Managed
Monica HQ
as a Service

Deploy Monica HQ as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

Monica is an open-source personal CRM — a private journal of the people in your life — combining the convenience of a cloud app like Dex or Cloze with the privacy and durability of self-hosted infrastructure. Use it for friends, family, clients, congregants, donors, or your warm-intro network. It is not a sales CRM and never will be.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Monica HQ

Monica HQ

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
GermanyFinlandNetherlandsUKSwedenUnited StatesCanadaSingaporeJapanAustraliaBrazilSouth Africa+9 more →
Monica HQ Preview Image

ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is ​Monica HQ

Monica is an open-source personal CRM — software for keeping track of the people in your life rather than the deals on your pipeline. It records contacts, family relationships, conversations, gifts given and received, important dates, and follow-up reminders. The project is licensed AGPL-3.0 and built by a small Montreal-based team.

The project began in 2016 as Régis Freyd's personal side project. It is maintained by Régis and Alexis Saettler. The hosted edition at monicahq.com has been priced at $9/month or $90/year since launch — that pricing has not moved in eight years.

The codebase is PHP on the Laravel framework, MySQL or MariaDB for storage, and Sabre/DAV for CardDAV/CalDAV sync. A next-generation rewrite called Chandler — released as v5.0.0-beta.5 in April 2025 — is the active development branch and ships with Keycloak and Kanidm SSO, Typesense search, and a refreshed UI. New installs are recommended to go straight to v5; there is currently no automated v4-to-v5 importer, so the choice matters at deploy time.

GitHub records over 24,000 stars on the repository and Monica HQ has reported more than 25 million pulls of its Docker image.

FEATURES

What ​Monica HQ does

Monica covers the practical machinery of remembering people: contacts and their family relationships, conversations you have had, dates that matter, debts and favours, gifts given and received. Eight features account for most of the daily use.

Contacts and relationships

Build a directory of the people in your life. Link spouses, children, parents, employers, and friends so a single contact's record shows their whole web.

Reminders and Stay-in-Touch

Set a follow-up cadence per contact: monthly, quarterly, annually. Monica nudges you when the interval lapses, by email or in-app notification.

CardDAV and CalDAV sync

Two-way contact sync to iPhone, macOS Contacts, Evolution, and any CardDAV-aware client. CalDAV exposes reminders and events to your calendar app.

Custom fields and tags

Add structured fields — allergies, kids' names, gift preferences — and free-form tags. Filter and search across the whole contact base.

Family-tree view

Visualise multi-generational relationships from a contact's record. Useful for wealth managers tracking household structure, genealogists, and faith communities.

Activity logging

Record calls, meetings, coffees, and notes against contacts. Custom activity types — Hospital visit, Sacramental milestone, Quarterly review — extend the default set.

Gift and debt tracker

Log what was given, received, and what is still owed. A small ledger that prevents awkward "wait, did I get them anything?" moments.

REST API and OAuth tokens

A first-class HTTP API protected by Laravel Passport. Generate personal access tokens for third-party clients, automation scripts, and personal dashboards.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed ​Monica HQ

The personal-CRM SaaS market thinned out between 2024 and 2025. Cloze repositioned to real-estate-only; UpHabit pivoted toward Salesforce-integrated B2B; Nat and Garden shut down. Monica is the open-source escape hatch — but only if someone is actually running the cron container and the queue worker. That is the work DANIAN does.

The trigger that brings most buyers to this page is a SaaS that left them behind. Cloze announced in September 2024 that real-estate agents were its lead customer; by July 2025, eXp Realty was naming it "CRM of Choice." Non-realtor Cloze users still need to track their book of relationships. UpHabit's free plan now caps at ten contacts. The hosted Monica HQ plan still exists at $9 per account per month, but it is a single-account product — there is no team tier — and the open-source community has wanted a real managed option for years.

Running Monica yourself is more work than it looks. The application image is straightforward to start; what bites is the surrounding choreography. Monica needs a companion container that executes php artisan schedule:run every minute — without it, birthday reminders, Stay-in-Touch nudges, and statistics jobs populate the reminder_outbox table but never send. The failure is silent. There is no banner in the UI saying "your reminders are not flowing." We watch upstream issues 4178, 3973, and 3668 every week — same root cause, different reporters, year after year.

The Monica setup we ship looks different from a vanilla install in five places. The queue connection is Redis, not the default sync driver, with a supervised queue:work worker process so reminders survive an SMTP rate-limit error. The scheduler container is wired and watched. Avatar storage points at object storage so the application filesystem doesn't fill with contact photos. The .env is hardened (APP_DEBUG=false, APP_ENV=production, SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE=true).

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run ​Monica HQ on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

SOLO THERAPIST · GERMANY

Moving off a paper appointment diary

Germany region for low EU latency. Monica runs alongside Vaultwarden on a 4 GB box. Custom domain clients.[practice].de. Public registration disabled. CardDAV syncs the active client list to Thunderbird. After each session, a 60-second "Call" activity logs the next-touch date. Caseload sits around 25 weekly appointments and ~90 active clients.

THO-PARTNER WEALTH MANAGER · US-EAST

Replacing a real-estate-pivoted CRM

US region for proximity to SEC filing infrastructure. Monica plus Cal.com plus Plausible on a shared VPS. SSO via Keycloak so the partners log in with firm credentials. Family-tree view is the killer feature — spouses, adult children, and the estate attorney all live in one record. Roughly 150 households of active book.

PARISH PASTORAL TEAM · CANADA

From spreadsheets to a real touchpoint log

Canada region. Monica plus Nextcloud Files for homilies and bulletins. Four-user account: priest, deacon, two lay ministers. Custom activity types for Home visit, Hospital visit, and Sacramental milestone. CardDAV pushes the parish directory to the secretary's iPad. Roughly 1,160 registered households — well inside Monica's reminder loop.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run ​Monica HQ

Four paths exist if you need Monica running for a year. Each has a defensible buyer. The comparison below is at 1, 5, and 10 active users — Monica is multi-user inside a single account, so "users" here means real humans logging in, not contact records.

 PATH1 USER5 USERS 10 USERSWAHT YOU CARRY
Monica HQ Cloud
Upstream-hosted SaaS
$9/mo$9/mo*$9/mo*A single hosted account on the upstream Cloud. Multi-user inside one account is supported; there is no team tier or per-seat pricing. *Multiple separate accounts scale at $9 each.
Self-host on a VPS
$24/mo production-class box
$24/mo + 5h ops$24/mo + 8h ops$30/mo + 12h opsA vanilla install. You own the cron container, queue worker, MySQL tuning, SSL renewal, off-site backups, and patching of Laravel and PHP. Plan five to twelve hours per month.
Home server
Synology DS923+ or HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus
~€600 + ~€8/moSame hardwareSame hardwareA box in your office. Cheaper per month after year one, but the off-site backup story is yours to invent and the WAN goes down with your power.
DANIAN Managed ​Monica HQ€9/mo€9/mo€9/moThe application running on infrastructure we operate. Cron sidecar is wired. Queue worker is supervised. Backups are off-site. Support is a person, not a form.

Monica HQ Cloud pricing reference: monicahq.com/pricing (May 2026). Production-class VPS figure is a representative all-in cost for a 4 GB / 2 vCPU box with backups, snapshots, and bandwidth at typical 2026 market rates. Home-server figure assumes a small NAS or microserver with five-year amortisation and excludes the operator's own time.

BY INDUSTRY

​Monica HQ for specific industries

Monica is a personal CRM, not an industry-specific application — and that is exactly why it adapts. Four buyer categories recur. Each puts different demands on retention, sync, and access control. Each gets a different DANIAN configuration.

Caseload data is sensitive even when it isn't formally clinical. Applicable standards depend on jurisdiction: in the UK, the BACP Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions requires clinicians to "keep accurate records" and "protect client confidentiality"; in the US, state professional-licensure boards set documentation norms.

We deploy these instances in an EU region (Germany, Finland, Spain, etc) on customer request, with public registration disabled, custom domain set, and a 30-day backup retention default — most therapists do not want a backup older than that floating around. A typical workflow: a 60-second "Call" activity logged within 24 hours of each session, with a next-touch date set seven days out. Per Headway's clinical engagement lead Natalia Tague, "it is standard for a full-time therapist to schedule 20 or 25 therapy appointments each week." Monica handles that scale without strain.
Relationship continuity is the product. The SEC Rule 204-2 recordkeeping requirement under the Investment Advisers Act sets a five-year preservation floor for adviser communications, and FINRA Rule 2210 governs anything sent outward to retail clients. Monica is internal-only notes — it does not send outbound communications — so the binding constraint is durability of the record itself.

We configure longer backup retention (five years on cold object storage), SSO through Keycloak so partners log in with firm credentials, and a US or Germany region depending on regulator. The killer feature is the family-tree view: spouses, adult children, and the estate attorney all live in one contact's record. Cerulli Associates reports the average US financial advisor serves about 150 clients, with the broader median around 235 households per firm — call it 400+ contact records once family links are added.
Pastoral relationships outlast any single member of staff. The Association of Professional Chaplains 2015 Standards of Practice in Spiritual Care describe documentation norms for spiritual care, and most diocesan or denominational bodies set their own retention rules on top.

We deploy these instances regionally — close to the diocese — and configure a multi-user account so the priest, deacon, and lay ministers all log in separately. Custom activity types do the heavy lifting: Home visit, Hospital visit, and Sacramental milestone (baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral) all become first-class entries. Each pastoral visit is logged the same day; sacramental anniversaries trigger automatic reminders for a hand-written card. The average US Catholic parish, per Georgetown's CARA, has roughly 1,168 registered households — comfortably inside Monica's reminder loop.
The warm-intro book is a working asset. Investor relationships need to be maintained on a cadence — quarterly for active LPs, annually for the rest — and SEC Regulation D Rule 506(c) general-solicitation rules push founders toward keeping a defensible record of who was pitched and when.

We place these instances close to the founder's primary fund cluster: US-East for New York and Boston books, US-West for the Bay Area, Germany or UK for European VCs. Custom domain. OIDC SSO through Google Workspace. The classic workflow: after every coffee or first call, a "Call" activity is logged within 24 hours and a 30-day Stay-in-Touch reminder is set. Robin Dunbar's 1992 paper sets the active-relationship ceiling at about 150.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

Yes, via Sabre/DAV. iPhone, macOS Contacts, and Evolution work out of the box. Thunderbird needs a specific nginx tweak to inject an RFC 7617-compliant WWW-Authenticate header (upstream issue 6183).
Yes. Monica added a CardDAV client in v4, so you can subscribe to an external CardDAV addressbook via php artisan monica:newaddressbooksubscription. CSV import is also supported.
Officially MySQL and MariaDB only. PostgreSQL is not supported by Monica. We pin you to a current MySQL release and handle character-set choice (utf8mb4) so international names and emoji store correctly.
No. Monica deliberately doesn't read mailboxes or auto-log email exchanges; every interaction is entered by you. The upstream design choice is documented in the README: "Monica is not a smart assistant." Outbound notifications — reminders, invites — do use SMTP.
Not currently. The original Monica mobile app was deprecated by the upstream project. CardDAV sync to your phone's native Contacts app is the recommended pattern.
On disk in storage/app/public/photos — not in the database.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
150+ open-source apps across automation, team chat, file sync, analytics, AI, password management, email marketing, dev tools, project management, smart home, CMS, and federated social. See the full catalog →
Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed ​Monica HQ for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.