A status page and uptime monitoring are not enterprise tools. They are the difference between knowing your app is down before your customers do — and finding out from a support email.
Most solo founders set up uptime monitoring after their first major outage. The correct time to set it up is before. A 5-minute setup that alerts you the moment your app is unreachable is the cheapest insurance you can buy for a subscription business.
When your app goes down, two things happen simultaneously: customers lose access to something they're paying for, and you don't know about it. The second problem is often worse than the first. A founder who discovers an outage 4 hours after it started, because a customer emailed to ask why the app isn't working, has a much harder recovery than one who knew within 5 minutes and communicated immediately.
Uptime monitoring closes the gap between the moment your app goes down and the moment you know about it. For a solo founder without a team, that gap is otherwise hours.
UptimeRobot — free for up to 50 monitors, 5-minute check intervals. Sends email, SMS, or Slack alerts when your app is unreachable. The correct starting point for every indie SaaS. Free tier is sufficient for most products.
BetterUptime — better alerting (phone calls, on-call rotation), incident management, and a status page included. From $22/month. Worth the upgrade once you have paying customers who expect reliability.
Freshping — free for 50 monitors with 1-minute intervals. Good alternative to UptimeRobot with a slightly cleaner interface.
Checkly — monitors API endpoints and simulates user journeys, not just uptime. Relevant when you need to verify that specific features work, not just that the app responds. From $29/month.
A status page is a public URL where your customers can check whether your service is operating normally. During an incident, it reduces support volume (customers can self-serve the information instead of emailing you) and demonstrates operational maturity.
Statuspage.io — the industry standard. Free for up to 100 subscribers. Integrates with most monitoring tools to update automatically during incidents. Host at status.yourdomain.com with a simple DNS CNAME.
BetterUptime status pages — included with BetterUptime plans. Good if you're already using them for monitoring.
Instatus — a newer alternative with a generous free tier and cleaner design. Worth considering for founders who want something that looks more polished out of the box.
At minimum: your main app URL (confirms the site loads), your login/signup URL (confirms authentication works), and your payment checkout URL (confirms Stripe integration is live). If you have an API, monitor a lightweight health check endpoint.
For Supabase-backed apps: add a monitor for your Supabase project URL specifically. Supabase has its own status page but a direct monitor on your project URL will catch project-specific issues that don't appear on the general status page.
Configure SMS alerts for any downtime over 5 minutes. Email alerts for warnings. Phone call alerts for critical services during business hours. Do not rely only on email — email is too easy to miss during an active incident.
Set up escalation: if the first alert is not acknowledged within 10 minutes, send a second alert via a different channel. Most monitoring tools support this. For a solo founder, this means ensuring at least two contact methods are configured.
Tell Marcus your current infrastructure and what you're worried about. You'll get a specific monitoring recommendation for your setup.
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