I Built an Uptime Monitoring SaaS in a Weekend — Here's What I Learned

The Setup I was paying $15/month for Uptime Robot. I used maybe 30% of it. Most days I just needed to know: is my site up? Friday night I thought: I could build this myself. Saturday night I realized: I could build this in a weekend. By Monday morning it was live. Now I have 50 users and 3 paying customers. Here's what actually happened. Friday: The Problem Gets Real You know when you pay for something you don't fully use, and you can't quite justify canceling it? That was me with Uptime Robot. $15/month × 12 months = $180/year for monitoring I could describe as: "tell me if my site goes down." I wasn't using: Advanced analytics The 17 different integration options Custom headers on requests Response time tracking Detailed historical reports I just wanted: HTTP request every 30 seconds, alert when it fails. So I sketched out what "simple" actually means: Core features: Monitor HTTP endpoints 30-second check interval (fast enough for real alerts, slow enough to not hammer servers) Webho