April 1, 2026
Uptime monitoring for indie hackers — what you actually need
You shipped your SaaS last weekend. You've got 12 paying customers, a landing page on a $5/mo VPS, and a Stripe webhook that occasionally makes your phone buzz with good news. You know you should monitor it. You search "uptime monitoring" and find Datadog, New Relic, and a wall of enterprise dashboards that cost more per month than your entire infrastructure.
You don't need any of that. You need to know when your thing is down. That's it. Here's what actually matters for solo founders and small teams.
What you don't need (seriously)
The monitoring industry is built for enterprises with 200-person SRE teams and seven-figure infrastructure budgets. Most of what they sell is irrelevant to you.
xAPM with distributed tracing
You have one server. There is nothing to distribute.
xCustom metrics dashboards with 50 widgets
You need to know up or down, not build a NASA control room.
xLog aggregation at $1.50/GB ingested
Your app generates 200MB of logs per month. SSH into your box and grep.
xAnomaly detection with ML
Your traffic pattern is "basically zero, then a Hacker News spike, then back to zero." ML is not going to help.
xMulti-region synthetic monitoring
Your users are in one timezone and your server is in one datacenter.
What you actually need
After running side projects and indie SaaS products for years, here's the shortlist of monitoring features that actually prevent you from losing customers.
False alert prevention
This is the most underrated feature in monitoring. If your tool alerts on every DNS blip and CDN hiccup, you'll mute the channel within a week. Then when your site actually goes down for 2 hours, you don't notice. Look for consecutive-check confirmation: the tool verifies a failure multiple times before alerting. This single feature is the difference between a monitoring tool you trust and one you ignore.
A free tier that isn't a joke
Most "free" monitoring plans give you 5 monitors at 5-minute intervals. That means your site could be down for 4 minutes and 59 seconds before you even know. Uptrack gives you 5 monitors with 30-second checks on the free plan — 10x faster detection without paying a cent.
Cron job monitoring
You probably have at least one cron job: sending emails, processing payments, generating invoices, syncing data. If that cron job stops running, nobody tells you. Cron monitoring (also called heartbeat monitoring) alerts you when a scheduled task fails to check in on time. This catches the silent failures that HTTP monitoring misses.
Status pages
When your 12 customers become 120, they'll start asking "is it just me or is the site down?" A public status page answers that question before they email you. It also makes your product look professional. Most indie hackers skip this because hosted status pages cost $29/mo elsewhere. With Uptrack, it's included free.
Simple setup, no YAML required
You shouldn't need to write configuration files to monitor a URL. Paste the URL, pick an interval, choose where to get alerts. Done. If the tool requires you to install an agent, write YAML, or configure a "workspace," it's not built for you.
The indie hacker monitoring stack
Here's exactly what to monitor when you're running a solo SaaS. This takes 5 minutes to set up and covers 95% of failure modes.
Monitor 1: Your landing page
URL: your homepage. Check interval: 1 minute. Add a body assertion for your headline text. This catches server crashes, DNS failures, CDN issues, and deployment breakages.
Monitor 2: Your app dashboard
URL: your app's login or dashboard page. Check interval: 1 minute. Your landing page might be a static site on Vercel while your app runs on a separate server. Monitor both independently.
Monitor 3: Your API health endpoint
URL: /api/health or /healthz. Check interval: 1 minute. Validate the response body contains your expected status. This catches database connection failures and memory exhaustion that a simple HTTP check might miss.
Monitor 4: Your payment webhook
Type: cron monitor. Expected interval: match your most frequent webhook. If Stripe webhooks stop arriving, this catches it. No more "wait, why haven't we had a signup in 3 days?" moments.
Monitor 5: Your email cron
Type: cron monitor. If you send transactional emails, daily digests, or weekly reports via a background job, monitor the job. Silent email failures are invisible until a customer says "I never got the invoice."
Five monitors. Three at 1-minute intervals, two cron monitors. All free. That covers your entire stack.
Why most monitoring tools fail indie hackers
The incentive structure is wrong. Enterprise monitoring tools make money by selling seats, data retention, and premium features. Their free tier exists to upsell you, not to serve you. The result: 5-minute intervals on free plans (so the product feels broken until you pay), limited alert channels (email only, no Slack), and aggressive "upgrade" banners everywhere.
Indie hackers need a tool where the free tier is genuinely useful, not a deliberately crippled demo. You should be able to monitor your entire side project stack without entering a credit card. When you grow and need more, the paid tier should feel like a fair deal, not a hostage negotiation.
Why we built Uptrack this way
We're indie hackers ourselves. We've been the person with 3 side projects, a $20/mo server budget, and a need to know when things break. We built the monitoring tool we wanted to use.
5 free monitors at 30s because 3 monitors at 5-minute intervals isn't enough
30-second checks on free because 5-minute intervals miss real outages
Consecutive-check confirmation on every plan because false alerts waste your time
Cron monitoring included because your background jobs matter as much as your homepage
Free status pages because professionalism shouldn't cost $29/mo
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