AckMan
A Quixotic Systems thing Free & Open Source

Send it.
They ack it.

The friendly little file server that hands out your company documents — and quietly writes down exactly who read them and who signed off.

Download AckMan ↓ Read the docs
📄 Self-hosted 🏢 On-prem or ☁️ cloud ⚖️ MIT license
Good for: Employee handbooks · Policy memos · Training material · Safety notices · Anything that needs a “yep, I read it.”
The problem

“I definitely read that.”
— everyone, about nothing.

You email the new policy. It vanishes into 200 inboxes. Three months later nobody remembers seeing it and you have zero proof either way. AckMan fixes the boring, important part: the receipts.

👀 Who opened it

Every view is logged with a name and a timestamp. No more guessing whether the memo got seen.

✍️ Who ack’d it

One click and they’re on record acknowledging the document. That’s the whole magic in the name.

🧾 Proof on demand

A clean audit trail you can hand to HR, legal, or that one auditor who loves a spreadsheet.

Why people like it

Small footprint. Big peace of mind.

$0 forever

Free & open source

MIT licensed, top to bottom. Read the code, fork it, run it for the whole company — no seats, no trial timer, no “contact sales.”

Your data

Self-hosted by design

Runs on a box you control. Documents and acknowledgement records stay on your infrastructure, not someone else’s server.

Your call

On-prem or cloud

Tuck it behind the office firewall, or stand it up on a cloud VM for remote teams. Same single binary, either way.

One file

Dead-simple deploy

A single program. Point it at a folder, open a port, done. Light enough to live happily on a Raspberry Pi in the supply closet.

No fuss

No account sprawl

Share a link, people read, people ack. AckMan handles the tracking so HR and Training don’t have to chase signatures by hand.

Built-in

Audit-ready records

Every open and every ack is timestamped and exportable. When someone asks “can you prove it?” — yes. Yes you can.

How it works

Three steps. Doc does the filing.

Step 01

Drop your docs

Put the handbook, memo, or training PDF into AckMan and share the link with your people.

Step 02

They read & ack

Folks open the document, give it a read, and hit one big friendly Ack button.

Step 03

You get receipts

AckMan logs who, what, and when — a tidy trail you can check, filter, and export anytime.

The Ack-O-Matic ™

Memo: New Coffee Policy

Effective immediately, the good mugs are for everyone. Please read carefully and acknowledge below. Go on — try the button.

Who’s ack’d 0 of 5
  • Priya N.
  • Marcus T.
  • Dana R.
  • Kofi A.
  • Yuki S.

↑ This is roughly what your tracking view feels like. Every tap is a timestamped record.

Get AckMan

Grab a build. Point it at a folder.

One self-contained program. Pick your platform.

Builds: coming soon
Linux x86-64

For servers, desktops, and most cloud VMs. The AMD64 workhorse build.

Download · soon ackman-linux-amd64 · v—
Raspberry Pi ARM64

Sips power, costs peanuts. Perfect for tucking AckMan in the office closet.

Download · soon ackman-linux-arm64 · v—
Windows x64

Run it on a spare Windows machine or server. Double-click friendly.

Download · soon ackman-windows-x64.exe · v—

Released under the MIT license. Source repository going public soon — watch this space.

The manual

Deploying it? Doc wrote it all down.

Install steps, config, on-prem and cloud setups, and how to read the acknowledgement trail. Fresh docs landing soon.

Open the docs →