Stop Paying for Monitoring: The Self-Hosted Stack for Indie SaaS Founders

Stop Paying for Monitoring: The Self-Hosted Stack for Indie SaaS Founders I'm going to say the quiet part loud: most indie SaaS founders are wildly overpaying for monitoring. I was too. Then I stopped. Here's what I was running before I built my own stack: Datadog: ~$15/host/month (that's the "cheap" tier) PagerDuty: $21/user/month Baremetrics: $129/month to see my own Stripe data That's $165+ every single month before I made a single dollar. For a solo founder? That's obscene. The Real Cost Problem The monitoring industry is built for teams. Datadog's pricing assumes you have 10+ engineers who need dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and incident management workflows. PagerDuty's on-call rotation features are genuinely useless if you're the only person getting paged. For indie hackers and small SaaS shops, we don't need enterprise observability. We need: Know when the app is down Know when something weird is happening with billing Know the basic health metrics without a PhD in PromQL The Se