Let's be honest: when you're building an MVP, monitoring isn't exciting. It doesn't ship features, close deals, or get you on Product Hunt. It sits on your backlog behind everything else.
Then your site goes down at 2 PM on the day a journalist is reviewing your product. Or your demo crashes during a VC pitch. Or your first paying customer churns because they hit downtime three times in a week.
Basic monitoring takes 15 minutes to set up and costs nothing. This guide gives you a startup-specific monitoring strategy that grows with your company—from MVP to scaling.
Want the full picture first? Read What is uptime monitoring.
Monitoring by Startup Stage
Your monitoring needs change as your startup grows. Don't buy enterprise tools for a pre-launch product, but don't run a revenue-generating SaaS on zero monitoring either.
Pre-Launch / Building
No users yet, still building
What You Need
- Basic uptime check on your landing page
- SSL monitoring (so your site doesn't show security warnings)
- Email alerts
Budget
$0 — Free tier is more than enough
Time to Set Up
5 minutes
Launched / First Users
People are using your product
What You Need
- Homepage + app/dashboard monitoring
- API health endpoint check
- SSL monitoring
- Slack or Discord alerts
- A basic status page
Budget
$0-10/month — Free tier or entry paid plan
Time to Set Up
15 minutes
Revenue / Paying Customers
People are paying you money
What You Need
- All critical endpoints monitored
- Multi-region checks
- Multi-step flow monitoring (login, checkout)
- SSL + domain monitoring
- Heartbeat monitoring for background jobs
- Branded status page
- Slack + SMS alerts
Budget
$10-30/month — Paid plan pays for itself
Time to Set Up
30-60 minutes
Scaling / Team Growing
Multiple team members, SLA expectations
What You Need
- Everything above
- On-call rotation
- Incident management process
- SLA tracking and reporting
- Post-mortem workflow
- Integration with your development workflow
Budget
$30-100/month — Tiny compared to team cost
Time to Set Up
2-4 hours initial, then ongoing
The 15-Minute Startup Monitoring Setup
Stop reading and do this. Right now. It takes 15 minutes and covers 80% of what you need.
Sign up for a monitoring tool (2 minutes)
Pick one with a free tier. You need: HTTP checks, SSL monitoring, and at least email alerts.
Add your main URLs (3 minutes)
Add 3-5 monitors:
- Homepage
- App/dashboard (if you have one)
- API health endpoint
- Login page
- Your most important feature page
Configure alerts (3 minutes)
Connect Slack or Discord if your team uses it. Add your email. Enable confirmation checks (alert after 2-3 failures).
Create a status page (5 minutes)
Set up a basic status page. When something breaks, you'll have somewhere to communicate—instead of scrambling to create one during an incident.
Verify it works (2 minutes)
Send a test alert to each channel. Confirm you actually receive it. Done.
That's it. You now have monitoring that's better than 90% of startups. Improve it later. Ship features now.
Startup Monitoring Mistakes
"I'll Set Up Monitoring Later"
"Later" is after your first outage, when a customer emails you, or worse—when a potential investor visits your site and it's down. Set up basic monitoring today. It takes 15 minutes.
Over-Engineering on Day One
You don't need 50 monitors, synthetic transactions, and PagerDuty integration for your MVP. Start with 3-5 basic checks. Add complexity when you need it.
Only Monitoring the Homepage
Your homepage loads fine. Your app is returning 500 errors. Your API is timing out. Monitor the pages your users actually use, not just the front door.
Ignoring SSL
Let's Encrypt is amazing until auto-renewal silently fails. An expired certificate makes your startup look like a phishing site.
No Status Page
When your site goes down, your first 10 users will email you. Your first 100 users will tweet about it. Have a status page ready before either happens.
Paying Too Much Too Early
A $50/month monitoring plan is overkill for a pre-revenue startup. Free tiers from established tools are genuinely good. Upgrade when your revenue justifies it.
Why Monitoring Matters More for Startups
First Impressions Are Everything
You get one chance with a potential customer, investor, or journalist. If your site is down or broken at that moment, there's no second chance. Enterprises recover from outages. Startups might not.
Every Customer Matters
When you have 50 users, losing 5 to an outage is 10% of your user base. When you have 50,000, it's noise. Early customers are your most important—they give feedback, spread word-of-mouth, and determine product-market fit.
You Don't Have a Support Team
Enterprise companies have support teams that field complaints during outages. You're the support team, the engineering team, and the CEO. Monitoring gives you a head start so you're fixing the problem, not discovering it from angry emails.
Downtime Kills Momentum
You just got featured on Hacker News. Traffic is spiking. And your site is down. Without monitoring, you might not know until the traffic is gone.
Quantify the risk: Calculate your downtime cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the best free monitoring tool for startups?
Look for a tool with multi-region checks and status pages on the free tier. UptimeRobot offers 50 basic monitors for free. PerkyDash offers fewer monitors but includes multi-region checks from 12 locations and status pages on the free tier. Both are solid starting points.
When should a startup start paying for monitoring?
When you have paying customers. At that point, downtime directly costs you revenue and trust. A $10-20/month monitoring plan is trivial compared to losing a customer. Before paying customers, free tiers are sufficient.
How many things should I monitor at launch?
Start with 3-5 monitors: homepage, main app page, API health endpoint, login page, and SSL certificate. This catches the most critical failures with minimal setup. Add more monitors as you identify what breaks.
Do I need monitoring if I'm on Vercel/Netlify/Railway?
Yes. Platform providers monitor their infrastructure, not your application. Vercel can be running perfectly while your app crashes due to a code bug, database issue, or third-party service failure. External monitoring catches problems that platform monitoring misses.
Just Start
The best monitoring setup is one that exists. It doesn't need to be perfect—it needs to be running. 15 minutes now saves hours of pain later.
Start with the basics. Grow with your product. Don't let "I'll do it later" become "I wish I had done it sooner."