Open-sourcing Notify Cyber

GitHub Repo • Archived Site • Reddit Post

After 2+ years and 17k+ unique visitors, we’re open-sourcing Notify Cyber!

In early 2023, Dylan Eck and I (Mehmet Yilmaz) built Notify Cyber because we were frustrated wading through fragmented cybersecurity news sources. We built a platform that aggregated news from 7+ sources including Apple security releases, CISA alerts, NIST CVE database, Dark Reading, IT Security Guru, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), Trellix, and The Hacker News. The backend was a Python collector that cleaned and processed the data without needing browser-based scraping; it could extract all the content using straightforward requests and parsing. We then summarized articles using OpenAI’s API and stored everything in a PostgreSQL database on Supabase. The frontend and serverless API were hosted on Vercel, Dylan built the clean Next.js and React interface while I maintained the backend. We registered the domain through Google Domains and handled the waitlist with a simple Google Form. It was entirely free tier infrastructure, which was perfect for proving out the concept. For the full story of what motivated us to build this, read our original blog post from May 29, 2023.

The launch was humbling. We launched in June 2023 with almost zero daily visitors. We spent the first two weeks doing Twitter marketing but got zero new users. Dylan and I were discouraged and we were going to can the project but as a last resort, we decided to make one final push on Reddit.

After days of back and forth, Dylan got a single post approved on and posted on r/cybersecurity. And within 3 days, we had 8k+ visitors and 100+ people on our waitlist. That post eventually hit 65k+ views with a 96% upvote rate.

Over two years, we grew to 17k+ unique visitors and 43k+ page views, all through organic growth. We also increased the waitlist count to 160+ within that time range. We even optimized ruthlessly, reducing monthly costs from $38 to just $1.85 by moving the collector from a cloud instance to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running in my home. The frontend and API stayed on Vercel’s free tier, but shifting the data collection to local hardware was the game changer. We set up a Linode instance as failover for when I traveled, but most of the time it was just this little Raspberry Pi humming away in the background, running Docker containers and keeping our database fed with fresh security news. That’s the kind of scrappy infrastructure that most people wouldn’t even consider, but it proved you don’t need expensive cloud deployments to run something with real impact.

We proved there was real demand for what we built. Running a live service meant dealing with real challenges like infrastructure failures and database issues, all of which taught us how to respond quickly and maintain reliability at scale. But ultimately, we couldn’t crack monetization or find a real business model that made sense. More importantly, both Dylan and I reached a point where the opportunity cost became too high. On October 5, 2025, we decided to retire the platform and open-source the entire codebase.

Through this journey, we discovered that timing and distribution matter. The MVP can be scrappy, but execution must be clean. Build what you enjoy solving. Real demand doesn’t always translate to a valid business model. And there’s dignity in retiring/pivoting a project.

As for what’s next, I’m currently focusing on solving some interesting problems at Charter/Spectrum and I’ve got some exciting projects on the horizon. But until then, I want to close this chapter with Notify Cyber. It has shown me a glance of what product-market fit looks like and how you don’t need funding and fancy marketing to make an impactful project/product. Bootstrapping might be the way for most software-based products and I am carrying that lesson forward into everything else I build moving forward.

If you’re building something, don’t be afraid to fail publicly. Keep shooting, iterate fast, pivot as needed, and know when to close one chapter so you can start the next one better.

Special thanks to Dylan Eck for driving the frontend and our Reddit success!

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