Uptime monitoring for solo founders
Put a free Logdash monitor on the 5 URLs your product cannot live without, connect Telegram, and you hear about an outage within 5 minutes instead of from a customer, with no server of your own to keep alive.
When you are the whole company, you are also the on-call rotation, the support desk and the person who finds out last. Users of a small product rarely email to say it is broken. They close the tab, and the next morning you see a dip in signups and no idea why. The job of a monitor here is narrow: notice before they do, and put it on the phone you already carry.
The free Hobby plan covers 5 services with one HTTP monitor each, checked every 5 minutes, plus 1 public status page and alerts on Telegram or a webhook. For most one-person products that is the entire surface. Nothing to install, and it runs on infrastructure that is not yours, so it keeps watching on the night your server does not.
What to put the 5 monitors on
- The app health endpoint, one that runs a database query. A landing page on a CDN stays up while the app behind it is down.
- The API, if it lives on its own host or region.
- The landing page, because a DNS change or a lapsed hosting bill takes it down without touching the app.
- Anything a customer pays for that has its own URL, like a docs site or the host that serves your embed script.
- Then stop. A monitor on something nobody would miss is an alert you learn to ignore.
Check it the way the monitor will
Logdash sends a GET, follows up to 5 redirects, gives up after 10 seconds and counts any final status from 200 to 399 as up. This curl does the same, so run it before you add the monitor and you will not be surprised by the first result.
curl -sL --max-redirs 5 --max-time 10 -o /dev/null \
-w '%{http_code} in %{time_total}s\n' \
https://yourapp.com/health- Add your URLs Create a service per URL and paste the address. The first check runs a second after you save, so a typo shows up now rather than during an outage.
- Connect Telegram Add @logdash_uptime_bot to a Telegram chat and send it the passphrase Logdash shows you, then tick that chat on each monitor. One chat can carry every monitor in the domain.
- Break one on purpose Point a monitor at a path that returns 404 and wait one interval. A Telegram message arrives saying the service is down, with the status code and the error, and a second one says it is up when you fix the path.
Logdash vs UptimeRobot for one founder
| Feature | Logdash | UptimeRobot |
|---|---|---|
| Free monitors | 5 services, one monitor each | 50 monitors |
| Free check interval | Every 5 minutes | Every 5 minutes |
| Telegram alerts | On the free plan | From the paid Solo plan |
| Monitor types | HTTP only | HTTP, keyword, ping and port |
| Faster checks | 15 seconds for $15 a month | 60 seconds on Solo, about €10 a month |
| App logs and metrics | Same service, eight SDKs | Not part of the product |
When UptimeRobot is the better pick
- You have more than 5 things to watch and no budget. 50 free monitors beats 5 every time.
- You want alerts by email or SMS. Logdash sends Telegram messages and webhooks, nothing else.
- You need keyword, ping or port checks. Logdash only makes HTTP requests.
When to pay
Builder is $9 a month for 20 services checked every minute. Pro is $15 a month for 50 services checked every 15 seconds, 15 status pages and a custom domain on them. The rule of thumb: pay when 5 minutes of downtime costs you more than $15. For a product with its first paying users, that day comes sooner than you think. Plans are priced per account, not per seat.