Almost every small team agrees on one thing: having a public status page is a good idea.
And yet, most of them don't have one.
Not because transparency doesn't matter, but because a status page almost never feels urgent. There's always something more pressing: a feature to ship, a bug to fix, a customer to reply to.
So teams improvise. They post updates in Slack or Discord, send emails, or reply one by one when users ask if something is broken.
It works — until it doesn't.
At some point, the lack of a single, clear place to communicate status starts creating friction, confusion, and unnecessary support load.
This article explores why so many teams keep postponing a status page, what they do instead, and when having a simple public status page actually makes a real difference.
"Important but not urgent": the status page paradox
Status pages are one of those things that almost everyone agrees are useful. They show up on best practices lists. They're recommended by investors, advisors, and peers. When you're evaluating a tool yourself, you often check if they have one.
And yet, when it comes to your own product, it keeps getting pushed to next sprint. Then the sprint after that. Then "someday."
The reason is simple: a status page doesn't help you ship features. It doesn't fix bugs. It doesn't close deals. On any given day, there's something that feels more productive to work on.
Status pages live in the "important but not urgent" quadrant. They matter when things go wrong, but when things are going well, they're invisible. And since most days things are going well, the motivation to set one up never reaches critical mass.
The irony is that by the time a status page feels urgent, it's already too late. You're in the middle of an incident, users are confused, support is overwhelmed, and now you're scrambling to set up something that should have been there all along.
What teams do instead (and why it kind of works)
In the absence of a status page, teams develop workarounds. Most of these feel natural and require no setup, which is precisely why they persist.
Email announcements. When something breaks, someone writes an email to the mailing list explaining what happened. This works if you have a small user base and everyone reads their email. It doesn't scale when you have thousands of users who don't check email in real time.
Slack or Discord posts. For products with active communities, posting in a channel is quick and reaches people who are already engaged. But it only reaches people in that channel, and the information gets buried as the conversation continues.
Social media updates. Twitter/X posts are fast and public. But they mix incident communication with marketing content, making it hard for users to find the information they need. And not all users follow your social accounts.
Manual support responses. When users ask "is the site down?", someone replies with the current status. This is personal and responsive, but it creates enormous overhead during incidents when many users are asking the same question simultaneously.
In-app banners. Adding a notice to the application itself can work, but only if users can still access the app. If the issue prevents loading the page entirely, in-app messaging is useless.
All of these approaches share a common characteristic: they work reasonably well at small scale. When you have a handful of users and incidents are rare, improvised communication is manageable. The problems emerge as the user base grows, as incidents become more visible, and as the team's time becomes more constrained.
| Approach | Works at | Breaks at |
|---|---|---|
| Email announcements | Small list, non-urgent issues | Real-time incidents, large audiences |
| Slack/Discord | Engaged community | Users not in channel, messages buried |
| Social media | Public awareness | Not all users follow, mixed content |
| Manual support | Few inquiries | Volume spikes during incidents |
| In-app banners | Partial outages | Complete outages, page won't load |
When not having a status page becomes a problem
For a while, improvised communication is fine. Then something shifts. It might be gradual, or it might be sudden. Here are the scenarios where the absence of a status page starts creating real problems.
An incident hits during off-hours. Something breaks at 2am or on a weekend. Users notice before you do. With no status page, they have no way to know if the issue is on their end, if you're aware, or if you're working on it. Some will email. Some will tweet. Some will assume the worst and start looking for alternatives.
Support tickets spike during outages. When there's no central place to check status, every affected user becomes a support ticket. "Is the site down?" appears in your inbox dozens or hundreds of times. Your team spends the incident responding to tickets instead of fixing the problem.
Users lose confidence. When users can't tell what's happening, they fill in the blanks with assumptions. Silence looks like incompetence or indifference. Even minor issues can erode trust if communication is absent or inconsistent.
Enterprise customers start asking. As your customer base matures, some will require operational transparency as part of their vendor evaluation. "Do you have a status page?" becomes a checkbox on procurement forms. Not having one can disqualify you from deals.
Internal communication suffers. Without a status page, your own team may not have a clear picture of what's happening. Sales doesn't know if they should delay a demo. Support doesn't know what to tell customers. Everyone pings the engineering channel asking the same questions.
Why status pages often feel like overkill
Even teams that acknowledge the value of a status page often hesitate. The reasons usually come down to perceived complexity and maintenance burden.
Setup looks complicated. Many status page tools are built for enterprises with dedicated SRE teams. They have complex integrations, webhook configurations, and incident management workflows. For a small team, this feels like massive overhead for something they'll hopefully rarely need.
Ongoing maintenance concerns. Teams worry about another thing to keep updated. If the status page shows "all systems operational" while the app is clearly down, it's worse than having nothing. The fear of maintaining yet another system is real.
Not sure what to monitor. Status pages require deciding what components to display and what constitutes "degraded" versus "down." For teams that haven't formalized their monitoring, this decision feels premature.
Public transparency feels risky. Some teams are uncomfortable with the idea of publicly displaying their uptime. What if competitors use it against them? What if customers see problems they wouldn't have noticed otherwise?
Cost versus perceived value. Status page services can be expensive, especially those targeting enterprise customers. For a small team trying to minimize expenses, spending money on something that only matters during incidents is hard to justify.
What a status page is actually good for
Looking past the objections, status pages serve a few specific purposes that alternative approaches don't address well.
A single source of truth. When something goes wrong, there's one place anyone can check. Users, team members, partners, investors, everyone can get the same information from the same place. No one has to ask "is it down?" because the answer is always available.
Reduced support burden. Many support tickets during incidents are just "is there a problem?" questions. A status page eliminates most of these. Users check the page, see that you're aware and working on it, and wait rather than opening a ticket.
Trust through transparency. Acknowledging problems publicly, even small ones, demonstrates maturity and builds trust. Users don't expect perfection. They expect honesty and communication. A status page makes that easy.
Historical record. Over time, a status page becomes a record of your reliability. It shows patterns, helps with post-incident analysis, and provides data for conversations about infrastructure investment. Some teams use this history to demonstrate improvement to stakeholders.
Professional appearance. A well-maintained status page signals that you take operations seriously. It's one of those small things that makes a difference when users are evaluating whether to trust your product with their work.
Simplicity changes the equation
Many of the objections to status pages assume a certain level of complexity. If setting up a status page requires integrating monitoring systems, configuring webhooks, designing incident workflows, and managing multiple components, then yes, it's a significant undertaking.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
The value of a status page isn't in its sophistication. It's in having a clear, accessible place to communicate. A simple page that shows current status and recent updates delivers most of the benefit with a fraction of the overhead.
When the barrier to entry is low, the decision changes. Instead of "should we invest in building a status page infrastructure?", the question becomes "why not have something simple in place?"
Simple doesn't mean unprofessional. A clean status page that's easy to update can be just as effective as a complex one with automated integrations. What matters is that it exists, that users can find it, and that it's kept current when issues occur.
The teams that succeed with status pages are often the ones that start simple. They create a basic page, use it during a few incidents, and gradually add sophistication as their needs evolve. Trying to build the perfect system before launching anything is how status pages stay on the "someday" list forever.
Final thoughts
Not every team needs a status page immediately. If you're pre-launch, have a handful of beta users, and rarely experience issues, there are probably higher priorities.
But for teams with real users who depend on the product, the question isn't whether a status page would be valuable. It's whether the perceived friction of setting one up is worth avoiding.
The teams that keep postponing usually aren't making a calculated decision. They're deferring because it never feels urgent, until it does. And by then, the benefit of having something in place is obvious, but the opportunity to set it up calmly has passed.
The right time to create a status page is when you have time to do it thoughtfully, not when you're in the middle of an incident scrambling to communicate.
Simplicity makes that easier. When a status page can be set up in minutes rather than days, the excuses for not having one start to disappear.
Transparency isn't about having perfect uptime. It's about being honest when things go wrong and making that honesty easy for users to access. A simple status page is one of the most straightforward ways to deliver that.