Your app is down. Paying customers are affected. Here is the exact sequence to follow — from diagnosis to communication to recovery — for a solo founder without a team.
Every SaaS goes down eventually. The founders who handle it well are not the ones with the most infrastructure — they are the ones who have a clear sequence to follow and communicate honestly with their customers throughout. Here is that sequence.
Do not immediately email your customers. Do not post on social media. Do not start debugging frantically without first understanding the scope. In the first 5 minutes: confirm the outage is real (check from a different network), check your hosting provider's status page (Netlify, Vercel, Supabase, Railway — all have status pages), and check whether the issue is your code or a dependency.
If the outage is a dependency (Supabase is down, Stripe is having issues, your hosting provider has an incident), you cannot fix it. Your job is communication, not debugging. If the outage is your code, you have a debugging problem.
Check in order: your hosting provider status page, your database provider status page (Supabase status, PlanetScale status), your authentication provider (Clerk, Auth0, Memberstack), your payment provider (Stripe status). If all green, the issue is your code or configuration.
For code issues: check your error logs first (Netlify logs, Vercel logs, Sentry if configured). Look for the most recent deployment — a bad deploy is the most common cause of sudden outages. If you deployed in the last 2 hours, roll back first and investigate second.
First message (within 30 minutes): "We're aware of an issue affecting [product]. We're investigating and will update you within [timeframe]. We apologise for the disruption." Short, honest, no blame, no technical detail. Post it wherever your customers are — email, status page, in-app banner if possible.
Updates every 30–60 minutes: even if you have no new information, send an update that says so. "We're still investigating. No resolution yet, but we'll update you at [time]." Silence during an outage is the most damaging thing a founder can do.
Resolution message: confirm the outage is over, explain what happened in plain language (not technical jargon), state what you're doing to prevent recurrence, and thank customers for their patience. A genuine, human message will recover most goodwill.
If Supabase is down and your app depends on it, your app is down too. This is a dependency risk that every solo founder accepts when building on managed infrastructure. The response is the same: check the status page, communicate to customers that you're aware and the issue is upstream, and give an honest timeline based on the provider's own estimates.
Do not promise a resolution timeline you don't control. "Supabase is experiencing an incident. Their status page estimates resolution by [time]. We're monitoring and will update you." is the correct message. Do not hide that a third party is involved — customers will find out and will lose more trust if you weren't transparent.
For outages under 2 hours: no automatic refund is necessary. A genuine apology and a commitment to improvement is the right response. Proactively extending trials or subscriptions by a day is a gesture that builds goodwill without creating a precedent for refunds on every incident.
For outages over 4 hours: consider prorating the affected billing period. If a monthly customer lost a day of access, a 1-day credit (roughly $2.60 on a $79/month plan) is appropriate and costs you almost nothing in revenue while demonstrating that you take their money seriously.
For catastrophic outages (24+ hours, data loss, repeated incidents): offer a genuine refund option. Customers who are given an easy exit and choose to stay are your most loyal customers.
Set up uptime monitoring before the next incident, not after. UptimeRobot (free for up to 50 monitors) and BetterUptime (better alerting, from $22/month) both send you a text or email the moment your app goes down. You should know about an outage before your customers do.
Set up a status page at status.[yourdomain].com. Statuspage.io has a free tier. Your customers can check it during incidents without contacting you, which reduces support volume and demonstrates operational maturity.
Tell Marcus your current setup and what went wrong. You'll get a specific recommendation for monitoring and incident response.
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