Why I Self-Host My Stripe Billing Monitor Instead of Paying for a SaaS

I caught a billing bug in production because my monitoring tool ran on the same machine as my app. Not on someone else's cloud. Not behind a 3-day trial wall. On my $5/month VPS, processing webhook events in real-time. Here's why that matters, and why I built BillingWatch instead of paying for yet another SaaS. The Problem With Stripe Monitoring Stripe's dashboard tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you when something stops happening. No new subscriptions for 48 hours? Dashboard looks fine — there's just nothing there. Payment failure rate quietly crept from 3% to 18%? You'll notice in a week when MRR dips. A promo code stacking bug producing negative invoices? Stripe will happily process those. The monitoring gap isn't Stripe's fault. They build a payment processor, not an anomaly detector. That's your job. Why Not Use [Insert SaaS Here]? I evaluated three billing monitoring SaaS tools. They all had the same problems: 1. Your revenue data lives on their server. Every webhook even