Introducing Radar: An Open-Source, Self-Hosted AI Media Intelligence Platform

Over the past few months I’ve been building Radar, an open-source media intelligence and social listening platform that anyone can self-host. The project started with a simple observation: most media monitoring platforms are incredibly powerful-but they’re also expensive, closed, and often lock users into proprietary AI services. I wanted to explore a different approach.

What is Radar?

Radar is a self-hostable platform for monitoring news and public media sources using AI. Instead of relying on proprietary datasets, it works with free public RSS and Atom feeds, allowing anyone to build their own monitoring environment.

One of the core design decisions is that Radar is AI-agnostic. Rather than forcing a single provider, you can choose between:

• Anthropic Claude
• OpenAI
• Grok

Current Features

• 📰 News aggregation from free RSS and Atom feeds
• 🤖 AI-powered summaries
• 😊 Sentiment analysis
• 🔍 Keyword and topic monitoring
• 📊 Searchable dashboard
• 🏠 Self-hosted deployment
• 🔓 Fully open source

Why Build Another Media Intelligence Tool?

Enterprise platforms such as Talkwalker and Brandwatch are excellent products, but they aren’t accessible to everyone. Radar is aimed at:

• developers
• startups
• journalists
• researchers
• agencies
• open-source enthusiasts

The goal isn’t to replicate every enterprise feature, but to build a transparent, extensible, and self-hosted alternative that anyone can inspect, modify, and improve.

Looking for Feedback

The project is still under active development, and I’d really appreciate feedback on:

• architecture
• user experience
• deployment
• scalability
• AI abstraction
• features that would make the platform more useful

If you’re interested in open-source AI, media monitoring, or self-hosted software, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Contributions, suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are all welcome.