Hey HN,

I've been running GitHub Actions across a dozen repos for a few years now. My workflow was always the same: push code, switch to GitHub, click through each repo to check if builds passed, repeat. When something failed, I'd often find out late because I forgot to check.

I looked at existing monitoring tools, but they all wanted OAuth access to my GitHub account. That meant giving them read access to my source code, build logs, secrets in environment variables, and everything else. For a dashboard that just shows me pass/fail status, that felt like way too much access.

So I built BuildBeacon with a different approach: webhook-only architecture.

How it works:

Instead of connecting via OAuth, you add a webhook URL to your GitHub repo (or org). GitHub sends events to BuildBeacon when workflows run. That's it. We never make API calls to GitHub, so we never see your code, logs, or anything you don't explicitly send us.

The tradeoff is that we can only show you what GitHub sends in webhook payloads—workflow name, status, duration, commit SHA, branch, actor. There is actually a lot of information. Everything that's needed to show all information without requiring access to any log contents or artifact data. For my use case (knowing if builds pass/fail across repos), that's exactly what I needed.

What you get:

- Dashboard showing workflow runs across all your repos

- Different views: cards per repo, grid of individual runs, PR tracking, checks, deployments, releases and analytics

- Team access to the same webhook data

Technical details:

- Frontend: Next.js 15

- Backend: Django REST API with Ninja

- Data stored in EU (I'm based in Europe, wanted to keep it simple for GDPR)

- Webhook secrets are hashed, we verify signatures on incoming events

Trying it out:

You'll need to create an account to get a webhook URL. Free tier gives you 3 repos with 14-day data retention. Setup takes about 3 minutes—generate webhook URL, paste into GitHub repo settings, trigger a workflow.

Limitations:

- GitHub Actions only right now. Planning to add GitLab and others later based on interest.

- No build log viewing (by design) but direct links to GitHub

- No mobile app yet

Pricing:

Free tier for small projects. Paid starts at $13/mo if you need more repos or longer retention.

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Would appreciate any feedback, especially on:

- Is the webhook-only approach a meaningful differentiator, or do most people not care about the OAuth access issue?

- What's missing that would make this useful for your team?

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or anything else.

Show HN: BuildBeacon – CI/CD Monitoring for GitHub Actions Without API Access