A new Montreal-based web app launched this week and it’s offering the Pro version free to other Montreal startups.

Castor, a dashboard that allows users to monitor all their user data in once place, was released at the end of last week and has since been featured on Product Hunt. Castor also made it to the top of Hacker News. Since its release it has had more than 20,000 web visits and a signup record of one user every 20 seconds.

The app was conceived as a side project at another Montreal startup OctHuber, but was established as a separate company when it ended up diverging so sharply from their main project, Shoprivy (soon to be released).

Castor arose out of a need the team at OctHuber were themselves facing.

“We conceived of it as a dashboard for all our other products; basically having a dashboard to monitor your data and see your users, your website visits, to aggregate all your data in one place in the office. It’s really an added value, an insight, to your everyday data,” Baptiste Laget, Castor’s Lead Software Engineer told MTLinTECH.

The decision to go public with it was in part because another dashboard project, called Status Board, discontinued development in November. “We knew their users would be looking for an alternative solution,” said Laget.

And while there are competing products still on the market, such as Power Tools and KPI indicators, the goal with Castor was to keep it really simple. Users can combine news feeds, calendars, custom charts and tables or even the weather in a single dashboard.

“We are delighted to introduce Castor as a simple, user friendly and inexpensive dashboard, much needed by developers and more broadly any type of data user” said Richard Forsans, CEO. “We thrive to make new technologies accessible to the greatest number. Any business can afford our dashboard and our pricing includes a base offer at no charge.”

The free version offers users one dashboard, while the pro version (at US$4/month) offers unlimited dashboards, screens, and developer tools.

“As we are from Montreal, and we do know that every startup needs a dashboard to track their products, we actually offering every startup in Montreal Pro Castor,” said Laget. “All they have to do is drop us an email to [email protected] and we’ll send it right over”