🚀 Putting Up a Status Page for $1/Month

Hi IndieHackers!

I've been working on the status pages for Pigeon Post and Lynk during the last week, and when I looked at existing solutions like https://statuspage.io or https://hyperping.io/, I found that either the prices were ridiculous (Status Page I'm looking at you 👀) or you couldn't customize the page's CSS too deeply.

Self-hosted solutions like https://cachethq.io/ are awesome but require having a database and some infrastructure to deploy on, and static solutions like https://marquez.co/statusfy don't do uptime monitoring for you (which is important to some businesses)

That's when I found https://updown.io! If I have 5 APIs (or Websites) that I want to monitor every 5 minutes, it only costs me $0.80/month for all of them - and I'll get 2 months for free. That's a lot more economical than what hyperping costs. The only downside is that I have to create the status page myself - thankfully Nuxt.js and TailwindCSS exist so I made short work of that during the Thanksgiving weekend.

And that brings me to this: https://status.pigeonpost.io

It's completely open sourced at https://github.com/Loophole-Labs/pigeonpost-status, is statically generated (so it's hosted for free on github pages), displays beautiful uptime graphs for every service (thanks to updown.io), and I can create incidents (like maintenance or downtime investigations) with markdown using the Nuxt Content plugin.

The only thing that this doesn't have is subscribers - I can't have customers subscribe to our status page to be automatically alerted when there's downtime. However, I'd argue that having subscribers isn't a necessary feature at all. If your service goes down it's trivial to send out an apology email to your customers, and you should already be sending maintenance emails a few days prior to keep your customers in the loop. Plus, doing it this way doesn't mean paying per-subscriber.