The SentinelGrid blog
What we're building and what we've learned doing it: uptime monitoring, status pages, managed IT for small teams, and running everything on the edge. Written plainly, no filler.
Employee offboarding IT checklist for small businesses
What to switch off, hand over and check when someone leaves a small business, in the order that matters, from email and passwords to laptops and phones.
read the post eastOne hour of security for people who don't do IT
A plain checklist for households and small offices: sign-in, passwords, updates, copies of your files, scams, and what to do when an account gets taken.
read the post eastYour shop already has the best diagnostic database in town
Years of closed repair orders are a diagnostic database nobody uses. AutoDX reads them and shows its sources. Sign-ups are now open.
read the post eastRunning every computer in an auto shop from one console
We built Zych's Fleet to enrol, police and monitor every Windows and Ubuntu machine in an auto shop. What it does, and what broke on the way.
read the post eastAn upload endpoint with no password, on purpose
The machines that most need to send you a log file are exactly the ones that can't. Here's the drop box we built for them, and why we just open-sourced it.
read the post eastHow we use AI, and where we don't
Most of SentinelGrid's software and documents are built with AI development tools and shipped by a named person. Client data never goes into them. Here is the actual policy, and why we'd rather say it than have you find out.
read the post eastWhat we changed in our legal pages for 2026, and why a three-client MSP bothers
Global Privacy Control honoured on every page, twenty state privacy laws, an appeal process, breach-notice deadlines, AI clauses and a DMCA agent: the 2026 update to SentinelGrid's terms and privacy policy.
read the post eastOur managed IT prices, published, and how we set them
Watch $149/mo, Manage $79/user, Operate $129/user. Why the beta rates are per user, why there are minimums, what's free, and the arithmetic behind the numbers.
read the post eastThe water bill nobody prints on a hosting invoice
Data centers are cooled with water and no invoice shows it. What we run on Raspberry Pis instead, including a whole production platform, and what stays at the edge.
read the post eastThe stack behind SentinelGrid: no servers, on purpose
Our helpdesk, monitor, CRM, and email all run on Cloudflare Workers and D1. Here's what a serverless stack makes possible for a small studio.
read the post eastBuilding SentinelVision: threat detection that refuses to recognize faces
How we run weapon and person detection on Raspberry Pi hardware at the edge, and why facial recognition is off the table by design, not by omission.
read the post eastWhat managed IT actually means for a small business
A plain-English guide to what an MSP does, what a flat monthly fee should include, and the questions to ask before signing with anyone, us included.
read the post eastEvery client gets a public status page. Here's why that wins.
Transparency is a support strategy: a public status page answers "is it down?" before anyone opens a ticket, and builds trust when things break.
read the post eastWhy we built our own uptime monitor instead of paying for one
Off-the-shelf uptime tools check that a page returns 200. Ours checks that the page is actually right. Here's why that difference matters.
read the post east