I Was Subscribed to 43 Status Pages. So I Built One Dashboard to Replace Them All.

#webdev #devops #saas #productivity

Every developer has been here.

You're forty minutes into debugging what you think is your own code. You've checked the logs, restarted the service, stared at the diff. Then a teammate casually drops: "oh yeah, Vercel has been having issues since this morning."

Forty minutes. Gone.

So you do the responsible thing. You go and find the status page for every tool your team depends on — Slack, Vercel, AWS, GitHub, Twilio, Stripe, Sentry, Cloudflare — and subscribe to alerts. At my last count, that was 43 separate subscriptions.

Within a week, they're noise. Some services email you for every minor maintenance window. Others only post when things are actively on fire. The formats are all different, the urgency levels are meaningless, and half of them land in your spam folder.

So you filter them. Then you ignore them. Then three months later you're back to finding out Twilio is down because a customer says they never got their verification code.

And when you change jobs? You get to do the whole ritual again from scratch.

What I actually wanted

I didn't want 43 email subscriptions. I wanted one place to glance at and see: are my tools working or not?

Not a complex monitoring suite. Not another DevOps platform. Just a dashboard that answers the question we all ask several times a week: "Is it us, or is it them?"

So I built it.

Introducing DownOrNot

DownOrNot pulls together the real-time status of the tools you rely on into a single dashboard. You pick your services, we monitor them, and when something breaks you know immediately — not when a customer tells you.

It's deliberately simple:

Pick the services you use
One unified view of all their statuses
Alerts via email and SMS, in one consistent format
Takes two minutes to set up, and two minutes to reconfigure when you change jobs

Why now?

The timing of the launch turned out to be unexpectedly relevant. This past weekend, an AWS data centre in the UAE was physically struck during the Iran conflict, cascading into outages for Asana, Vercel, and other services across the Middle East. Unless you were watching the right status page at the right moment, you'd have had no idea why your deployments were failing.

It's an extreme example, but the everyday version happens constantly. Services degrade, status pages update quietly, and teams waste hours before someone thinks to check.