I Built SSL Reminder So an Expired Certificate Doesn’t Break Your Site

I Built SSL Reminder Because an Expired Certificate Shouldn't Be the Reason a Site Looks Broken

I used to think SSL certificates were mostly a solved problem.

You set up Let's Encrypt, configure automatic renewal, test that HTTPS works, and then move on. For most websites and services, that is exactly how it should be. Certificates are not something you want to think about every week.

But if you run a few domains, a personal site, a small API, a NAS behind a reverse proxy, or some random services that have stayed online longer than expected, things slowly become less tidy.

One certificate is renewed by a panel. Another one depends on a cron job. One domain is managed through a cloud provider. One old subdomain still works, but nobody remembers where it was configured. A test service quietly becomes something people actually use.

Then one day, a browser shows the warning nobody wants to see.

The server is fine. The app is fine. DNS is fine. Nothing really "crashed".

The certificate just expired.

That is a small technical problem, but it feels much bigger when someone opens your site and sees a security warning.

That is why I built SSL Reminder, a small iOS app for tracking SSL/TLS certificate expiration dates before they become visible problems.

The annoying thing about SSL certificates

Expired certificates are both easy to fix and easy to forget.

If you notice the problem early, renewal is usually simple. If you only notice it after a browser warning appears, it already looks bad from the outside.

This is especially true for small sites and self-hosted services.

A company with a mature operations team probably has monitoring, alerts, dashboards, and people who care about certificate status. But a lot of personal and small-team infrastructure is built more casually.

You set something up because you need it. It works. You leave it alone. Months pass.

That is how many useful little services live.

The problem is that SSL certificates do not care whether the project is active, half-active, forgotten, or suddenly important again. They still expire on a date.

Why I wanted a separate app for this

There are already good monitoring tools. If you run Uptime Kuma, Prometheus, Grafana, cloud monitoring, or a full alerting system, you may already have a way to watch certificates.

But I did not want to build another large monitoring platform.

For this specific problem, I wanted something smaller.

I wanted to open my phone and see which certificates were healthy, which ones were getting close to expiration, and which checks had failed. I did not want to deploy a server just for that. I did not want to create a complicated alert rule. I did not want another dashboard that only makes sense after setup.

So SSL Reminder is intentionally narrow.

Add a certificate target. Let it check. Get reminded before the date becomes a problem.

That is basically the whole idea.

What SSL Reminder does today

SSL Reminder checks public SSL/TLS certificate targets from the cloud and shows their status in the app.

It can show remaining days, certificate status, issuer, subject information, and a simple health report. It can also send push notifications when a certificate is close to expiring or when a check fails.

The current version supports up to 15 certificate targets for free.

There is no account requirement. There are no ads. You can import and export your targets, and you can delete cloud data from the app.

I kept the first version simple on purpose. Certificate reminders should not feel like another system you have to maintain.

For many people, 15 targets are enough for the things that actually matter: a personal website, a blog, a public API, a reverse proxy entry point, a NAS access domain, a small company site, or a few long-running side projects.

The kind of services I would add first

If you try the app, I would not start by adding every hostname you own.

I would start with the domains that would be embarrassing or inconvenient if they suddenly showed a browser security warning.

Your main site. Your blog. Your API endpoint. Your public reverse proxy domain. Your small business landing page. That old service you do not open every day, but still need once in a while.

Those are usually the ones worth tracking first.

The sites you visit every day are easier to notice when something breaks. The quiet ones are more dangerous because nobody is looking at them until the day they are needed.

A note about private services

SSL Reminder uses cloud-based checks, so it works best with publicly reachable SSL/TLS endpoints.

If your service only exists inside your LAN, behind a VPN, or on a private network, the cloud checker may not be able to reach it. That does not automatically mean the certificate is bad. It simply means the checker cannot access the service from outside.

For private infrastructure, a local probe or internal monitoring setup is usually a better fit.

This app is focused on public certificate targets and lightweight reminders.

Why no account?

For this kind of tool, the first experience matters.

If someone only wants to track a few certificates, asking them to create an account before they can even try it feels unnecessary.

So the flow is simple: install the app, add a target, and start checking.

No sign-up. No ads. No long onboarding.

Just a small utility that does one job.

Maybe that sounds less ambitious than building a full platform, but I like tools that know their boundaries. Not every operations problem needs a large product around it. Sometimes the useful thing is just a reminder at the right time.

What I learned while building it

The more I build small infrastructure tools, the more I believe many real problems are not dramatic failures.

They are small things that quietly drift.

A renewal job stops working. A domain points somewhere old. A backup has not run recently. A certificate is close to expiration. A service nobody checks every day becomes important again.

None of these feel urgent until they are suddenly visible.

SSL Reminder only handles one of those problems. It will not replace a monitoring stack, and it is not trying to. But if it helps someone renew a certificate before users see a warning, that is already useful.

Final thoughts

I built SSL Reminder because I wanted a simple way to keep an eye on SSL certificates without turning it into a bigger project than necessary.

If you maintain a website, a public API, a reverse proxy domain, a small business site, or a few self-hosted services, it may be useful for you too.

You can download it here:

SSL Reminder on the App Store

If you try it, I would love to hear how you manage SSL certificates today, especially across personal sites, homelabs, small teams, and long-running side projects.