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March 15, 2026

# Why This Exists

## The Problem

If you manage MikroTik routers for a living, you already know the pain. Fifteen WinBox tabs open. SSH sessions to three different sites. A spreadsheet somewhere tracking firmware versions that's been wrong since last Tuesday. Maybe you tried The Dude, got it working on a CHR, and then watched it crash when you hit a few hundred devices. Maybe you looked at ISPApp and decided you didn't want your client credentials living on somebody else's cloud server.

The tools that exist for MikroTik fleet management are either abandonware, cloud-only, or duct tape. That's the gap.

## Two Decades of "Somebody Should Build This"

I've been working at ISPs and MSPs since 1997. I'm not a developer. I'm a network guy — a jack of all trades, master of none. I've wanted something like The Other Dude to exist for almost two decades. I've started building it half a dozen times in half a dozen languages and gotten nowhere every time, because building real software is hard when it's not your day job.

Then AI happened.

Not the hype. Not the "AI will replace everyone" nonsense. The actual tools — the ones that let somebody who understands the problem deeply but can't write production code alone finally turn the thing in their head into something real. Claude and ChatGPT didn't build this for me. They made it possible for me to build it myself.

And honestly, if you're still gatekeeping who's "allowed" to build software, you sound like the old-head web developers who swore WYSIWYG editors would ruin the internet. The internet's fine. The tools got better. Move on.

## About Support (Read This Part)

Let me be straight with you: I am not a people person.

I built this because I'd rather solve problems with code than phone calls. I'd rather write docs than answer the same question forty times. That's not going to change.

If you need help:

Open a GitHub issue. That's where I look. That's where problems get fixed. Issues are public, searchable, and help everyone — not just you.

I probably won't answer email. It's nothing personal. I just don't want to. The docs are thorough for a reason. The documentation site exists because I'd rather spend four hours writing good docs than four minutes on a support call.

## What's Coming

A hosted SaaS version is on the horizon.

For those of you who are equally cranky bastards — tired of Docker Compose, database backups, SSL certs, and all the server babysitting that comes with self-hosting — there will be an option to just pay money and have the thing work. No servers to manage. No updates to run. Just log in and manage your routers.

The self-hosted version isn't going anywhere. It's open source, it's yours, run it however you want. But if you'd rather someone else deal with the infrastructure so you can focus on your actual network, that's coming.

## The Bottom Line

The Other Dude exists because the MikroTik fleet management space deserves better than what's out there. It's self-hosted, it's source-available, it takes security seriously, and it puts WinBox in your browser without installing anything.

If that sounds useful, go set it up. If something's broken, open an issue.

I'll be here. Just not on the phone.

The Other Dude is open source MikroTik fleet management — read the docs or view on GitHub.