Web monitoring scouts that live inside your Postgres cron

What it does

Open Scouts is a web monitoring dashboard where you define “scouts” — scheduled queries that periodically search the web for specific information. An OpenAI agent generates search strategies, Firecrawl handles scraping, and the system emails you when it finds something new. Everything runs on a Next.js frontend with Supabase handling auth, storage, and real-time updates.

The interesting bit

The scheduling backbone is built almost entirely inside PostgreSQL: pg_cron checks every minute for due scouts, then pg_net fires HTTP requests to isolated Supabase Edge Functions. It is essentially a serverless cron dispatcher built from database extensions rather than a traditional job queue.

Key highlights

• Each scout runs in its own Deno edge function invocation, so failures stay isolated.
• Execution results get one-sentence AI summaries with vector embeddings stored via pgvector.
• Users bring their own Firecrawl API keys through the UI, keeping usage tied to individual accounts.
• Supports email alerts via Resend, though you’ll need a verified domain to reach arbitrary inboxes.
• The README claims the dispatcher architecture is designed to scale to thousands of scouts.

Caveats

• The setup is heavy on external services: Supabase, OpenAI, Firecrawl, Resend, and optionally Google Cloud for OAuth.
• Resend’s free tier restricts unverified domains to sending only to your own account email.
• A “Partner Integration” for automatic per-user Firecrawl keys is noted as enterprise closed beta and not publicly available.

Verdict

Good fit if you want a reference architecture for scaling scheduled AI tasks via Postgres primitives, or if you need a plug-in web monitor for personal alerts. Skip it if you’re looking for a lightweight, single-binary self-hosted tool; this is a modern SaaS assembly kit.