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The StatusPage folks are executing incredibly well on adressing a tangible pain point. It's been a lot of fun to watch.

7Figures2Commas 13y ago
statuspage.io might have a great product (I'm not a customer), and I can see the value in some of the things they offer (like the ability to pull in data from third party monitoring services), but if operating a useful status page is a "tangible pain point" worth paying $79/month plus for, Silicon Valley is in trouble. I appreciate that companies don't want to build everything, nor should they, but pushing every piece of non-core functionality onto a SaaS is just insane. The worrisome thing for many but not all of the SaaS startups primarily targeting other startups is that when the next downturn arrives, the number of companies eager to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars a month on a portfolio of SaaS services for just about every function will likely decrease substantially.
- redguava 13y ago
  If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. This is their area of expertise, their passion and their business. They'll make a better status page than I would.
  - 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
    > If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. Your status page is not your product (hopefully). If you run an online service, the purpose of a status page is to inform your customers of downtime and other issues that may affect their use of your service. Like I said, I am not questioning whether statuspage.io has built a better status page than what most companies would be motivated to build themselves. What I am pointing out is that spending $xx or $xxx each month on a SaaS for every little piece of functionality you don't want to build internally adds up. As for the costs of building internally, I would suggest that a half-decent engineer could build a satisfactory status page with email/SMS notification functionality in 2-3 days. If you want to be generous and say it would take a week, and your engineer is paid $110,000/year (~$2300/week), you're still ahead of statuspage.io's $249/month plan, which costs $3,000/year and limits you to just 2,500 subscribers. If you operate, say, an API that is critical to your business and keeping consumers of that API informed about status is important, there's no reason not to invest engineering time in owning the status page functionality. On the flip side, if your status page isn't all that important, paying $xx or $xxx/month for a robust status page service instead of, say, rolling a status page of your own using [insert popular open-source CMS of your choice] doesn't make a lot of sense.

statuspage.io might have a great product (I'm not a customer), and I can see the value in some of the things they offer (like the ability to pull in data from third party monitoring services), but if operating a useful status page is a "tangible pain point" worth paying $79/month plus for, Silicon Valley is in trouble. I appreciate that companies don't want to build everything, nor should they, but pushing every piece of non-core functionality onto a SaaS is just insane. The worrisome thing for many but not all of the SaaS startups primarily targeting other startups is that when the next downturn arrives, the number of companies eager to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars a month on a portfolio of SaaS services for just about every function will likely decrease substantially.

redguava 13y ago
If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. This is their area of expertise, their passion and their business. They'll make a better status page than I would.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
  > If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. Your status page is not your product (hopefully). If you run an online service, the purpose of a status page is to inform your customers of downtime and other issues that may affect their use of your service. Like I said, I am not questioning whether statuspage.io has built a better status page than what most companies would be motivated to build themselves. What I am pointing out is that spending $xx or $xxx each month on a SaaS for every little piece of functionality you don't want to build internally adds up. As for the costs of building internally, I would suggest that a half-decent engineer could build a satisfactory status page with email/SMS notification functionality in 2-3 days. If you want to be generous and say it would take a week, and your engineer is paid $110,000/year (~$2300/week), you're still ahead of statuspage.io's $249/month plan, which costs $3,000/year and limits you to just 2,500 subscribers. If you operate, say, an API that is critical to your business and keeping consumers of that API informed about status is important, there's no reason not to invest engineering time in owning the status page functionality. On the flip side, if your status page isn't all that important, paying $xx or $xxx/month for a robust status page service instead of, say, rolling a status page of your own using [insert popular open-source CMS of your choice] doesn't make a lot of sense.