I Fired $230/Month of SaaS With One Bash Script. Here's the Exact Kill List.
Solo operators: audit your subscriptions right now. Mine was $230/month for uptime monitoring, log alerts, cron dashboards, and a "server hygiene" tool I'd logged into twice. $2,760/year to watch four URLs.
Here's what replaced it — 200 lines of bash that hasn't missed a check in 14 months.
The Kill List (and what survived)
Killed: uptime monitoring ($29/mo) → sensor.sh. A cron'd script that curls every money URL and validates the content, not the status code. A 200 with an empty body is the most expensive lie in solo ops. It caught a scraper serving empty JSON for two weeks straight.
Killed: log alerting ($49/mo) → ledger.txt. One append-only line per check: timestamp, what was checked, what was found. When something breaks at 2 AM you reconstruct the timeline in 60 seconds with tail -20. That's 90% of incident response when you have no team.
Killed: cron dashboard ($19/mo) → healer.sh. Dead process? Restart it. Then prove the restart worked — check the port, check the endpoint, write the verdict. A healer that doesn't verify is a prayer, not a healer.
Survived: payments and email. Those touch strangers' money. Never hand-roll money rails.
The Three Rules
- Every check writes a line. Observability without a written trail is a feeling, not a system.
- Every healing gets a verdict. RESTARTED_OK or RESTART_FAILED — recorded, not assumed.
- Every alert includes the last 20 ledger lines. Context in the pager, or you'll be SSH-ing at 3 AM anyway.
Total runtime cost: about 2 minutes of cron per day. Total monthly cost: $0.
Steal the Architecture
I packaged the exact scripts — sensors, ledger format, healer with verification, pager test, escalation ladder — as Ops Starter Kit, plus Automation Starter Pack (monitoring/restart patterns) and Agent Ops 24/7 (the runbook for AI agents that run a business unattended).
Everything's here: HIVE80LAB — https://hive80lab.gumroad.com
Use code LAUNCH50 for 50% off — it's cheaper than one month of the dashboard you forgot to check. And even if you never buy: kill the subscriptions, keep the three files. Your future 2 AM self says thanks.
Top comments (0)