Thanks for the responses so far folks. It's interesting, because I raised this idea in a separate thread, and there was a lot of "i'd use that" kind of response

Thanks for the responses so far folks. It's interesting, because I raised this idea in a separate thread, and there was a lot of "i'd use that" kind of responses. Glad I'm double checking... :) My initial thought (and maybe my MVP proposal does not reflect this) was to bring some of the features that things like Gomez offers (detail timing, screen caps, transactional walkthroughs, etc) down into the pricing space of the lower end offerings. I've worked for a large internet retailer before where we used Gomez - talking tens of thousands of dollars a year for just a few tests. Ridiculous. But having used it, at least on our site, I can say that it was definitely the fine grained monitoring that saved our asses -- things would NEVER outright 50x, just fail in really subtle/glitchy ways. Maybe it was because our system was for more complicated than Johnny PHP/Rails. IMHO 50x means the network is down, the IT guy unplugged something, you're getting DDOS'd or your system is just inherently unstable. It never meant "Apache died" - because Apache never did die, for years and years. Maybe I'm wrong to try to take "head" features and push them down to "tail" pricing. Perhaps I could try to create a higher level offering that's still more affordable than Gomez. I don't know what that pricepoint would be though. Watchmouse has a transactional/clickthrough offering for $500/month. They look hard to compete with - their offering is quite robust. As for other offerings, I don't know. They don't tend to publicize a lot of their pricing, seem to have a not-so-self-service sales cycle. I don't see the point of trying to create a "cheaper than cheap" option and competing with the simple-ping tail. I guess I just though I saw an opportunity where some people may be getting greedy with their margins, and thought I could fill in that hole with an offering that was equivalent where it mattered, but at a much lower price point. Low enough where people in the tail would maybe even step up into it. Perhaps the world is perfectly happy in a bimodal setup - the "<$5/mo ping and L7 check against one URL" type of monitoring and the ">$x,000 or $x0,000 year total solution" type of monitoring.