You shipped your SaaS last week. You have 12 users and zero revenue. Should you really be spending time on monitoring?
Yes. Here's why.
Those 12 users are your most important users. They're early adopters who took a chance on your product. If your site goes down for 4 hours and you don't notice because you're heads-down building features, you might lose half of them — silently. They won't email you. They'll just stop coming back.
Indie makers face a unique situation: you move fast, you run lean, and you're probably managing 2–3 projects simultaneously. You don't have a DevOps team. You don't have on-call rotations. You barely have time to check your own product.
That's exactly why monitoring matters. It watches when you can't.
This guide is for you — the solo founder or tiny team building and shipping products. No enterprise fluff. Just what you actually need.
The Indie Maker Monitoring Mindset
Good enough is good enough
Let's be clear about what monitoring means for an indie maker:
It's not enterprise observability. You don't need Datadog. You don't need APM traces. You don't need 47 dashboards. You need to know when your stuff is broken.
It's a safety net, not a project. Set it up once, let it run. Don't spend more time monitoring than building. The whole point is that monitoring works in the background while you focus on shipping.
It scales with you. Start with the basics. Add more monitoring as your product grows and your revenue justifies the time investment.
The indie maker monitoring philosophy: minimum viable monitoring that catches maximum viable problems.
What that looks like:
- Uptime check on your main product URL — catches outages
- SSL monitoring — prevents the "your connection is not private" disaster
- A status page — communicates when things break
That's your baseline. Everything else is optimization.
What to Monitor (And What to Skip)
Prioritize ruthlessly
Monitor these (high impact, low effort):
Basic HTTP check, 60-second interval. If your app is down, you know within a minute. This is the single most important check.
If your product has an API (even for your own frontend), monitor it separately. The API can fail while the marketing site works fine.
One-time setup, runs forever. Saves you from the most embarrassing and most preventable outage. Check yours now.
If hosted separately from your app (common with indie makers), monitor both. If marketing is down, new signups stop.
Skip these (for now):
The 20-Minute Monitoring Setup
From zero to monitored
Here's the exact setup for an indie maker with one product:
Sign up for monitoring
Create an account on your monitoring tool of choice. PerkyDash, UptimeRobot, or similar.
Add your product URL
Add an HTTP check on your main app URL. Set interval to 60 seconds. Enable alerts via email (and Slack if you use it).
Add your API
If your product has an API endpoint (e.g., api.yourproduct.com or /api/health), add a separate check. APIs and frontends fail independently.
Add SSL monitoring
Add your domain for SSL certificate monitoring. Set alerts at 30, 14, and 7 days.
Add your marketing site
If your landing page is separate from your app (e.g., static marketing site + separate app subdomain), add a check for the landing page too. If marketing is down, new signups stop.
Create a status page
Create a simple status page with 2–3 components: App (your main product), API (if applicable), Website (marketing/landing page).
Configure alerts and test
Set email as primary alert. Add Slack webhook if applicable. Test by temporarily misconfiguring a URL. Verify you receive the alert.
Done. Your product is now monitored 24/7. Go back to building.
Monitoring Multiple Projects
The indie maker's reality: 3 products, 1 person
If you're like many indie makers, you're running multiple projects simultaneously. A SaaS app, a tool, maybe a content site. Each needs monitoring but you can't spend all day watching dashboards.
One monitoring tool for everything.
Don't use different tools for different projects. One dashboard, one alert stream, one login. Consolidation saves mental overhead.
Group by project.
Organize your monitors by product name. When an alert fires, you immediately know which product is affected without reading the full URL.
Prioritize by revenue / users.
Your product with paying customers gets 60-second checks and SMS alerts. Your side project with 0 users gets 5-minute checks and email-only alerts. Allocate monitoring resources proportionally.
One status page per product.
Each product should have its own status page. Users of Product A don't need to see Product B's status.
Weekly check-in routine.
Every Monday morning, spend 10 minutes reviewing all your monitoring dashboards. Look for:
- Any incidents you missed over the weekend
- SSL certificates approaching expiry
- Response time trends (is anything getting slower?)
- Any monitors that stopped working (it happens)
This 10-minute weekly ritual catches problems before they become emergencies.
When Your Product Has No Users (Yet)
Monitor before you launch
Should you monitor a product that nobody uses yet? Yes, and here's why:
You need the product to be up when someone arrives.
You're tweeting about your product, posting on Reddit, submitting to Product Hunt. If someone clicks through and your site is down, that impression is gone forever. You'll never know you lost them.
Pre-launch is the best time to find reliability issues.
Before users depend on your product, downtime is embarrassing but not costly. After you have paying customers, downtime costs money and trust. Find and fix reliability issues before they matter.
It takes 10 minutes.
The time investment is trivial compared to the weeks you spent building. Don't let a $10/month monitoring tool be the thing you skip.
Building in public? Monitoring proves credibility.
If you share your uptime stats publicly (e.g., "99.9% uptime since launch"), that's powerful social proof. You can't share what you don't track.
Minimum pre-launch monitoring:
- HTTP check on your landing page
- SSL check on your domain
That's it. Add more as users arrive.
Growing Into More Monitoring
When to level up
Your monitoring should grow with your product. Here's the progression:
Stage 1: Pre-launch / 0–100 users
$0–$10/mo- Uptime check on main URL
- SSL monitoring
- Simple status page
Stage 2: 100–1,000 users / first revenue
$10–$20/moAdd:
- API endpoint monitoring
- Response time thresholds (alert at >3 seconds)
- Visual monitoring for critical pages
- Multiple alert channels (email + Slack)
Stage 3: 1,000+ users / $1K+ MRR
$20–$40/moAdd:
- Checkout/signup flow monitoring
- Multi-location monitoring
- Status page with subscriber notifications
- Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs / background tasks
Stage 4: Scaling / $5K+ MRR
$50–$200/moConsider adding:
- APM / error tracking (Sentry, etc.)
- Log aggregation
- Database monitoring
- Incident management process
The key: don't jump to Stage 4 on day one. Each stage matches the complexity and stakes of your product at that point. Over-monitoring too early wastes time and creates noise. Under-monitoring too late loses customers.
Status Pages as a Trust Signal
Small detail, big impact
Having a public status page for your indie product sends a signal: you take reliability seriously.
For indie makers specifically, this matters because:
Users are taking a bet on you.
Choosing a small indie product over an established player is risky for users. A status page says "I might be small, but I'm professional and transparent."
It reduces "is it just me?" moments.
When users encounter an issue, they check your status page before emailing support (which for indie makers is... your personal inbox). This saves you time and reduces the anxiety of getting a "your product is broken" email while you're in the shower.
It's a competitive advantage.
Most indie products don't have status pages. Having one instantly differentiates you. When users compare your product to another indie tool without a status page, you win on perceived reliability. See real status page examples for inspiration.
Building in public synergy.
If you share your uptime stats in your #buildinpublic posts, the status page backs it up. "PerkyDash had 99.98% uptime in January — here's the status page" is powerful content.
Setup time: 5 minutes. Impact: outsized. Try the free emergency status page to see it in action.
Conclusion
Indie maker monitoring is simple:
- Monitor your product URL and API (catches outages)
- Monitor your SSL certificate (prevents the most embarrassing failure)
- Have a status page (communicates when things break)
- Spend 10 minutes per week checking your dashboard
That's it. 20 minutes to set up. 10 minutes per week to maintain. Less than $10/month.
The products that survive aren't just the ones that ship fast — they're the ones that stay up. Monitor like your early adopters depend on you, because they do.
Now go ship something. Your monitoring will watch while you build.
Start monitoring your product today.
PerkyDash Pro (€9.99/mo): Uptime + SSL + visual diff + status pages
Free tools: SSL Checker, Uptime Check, Emergency Status Page
Built by an indie maker, for indie makers.