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 right