I built an uptime monitor after Freshping shut down — here's what I learned
On March 6, 2026, Freshping shut down with about two weeks notice.
I'd been using it for years. 1-minute checks, multi-location alerts, public status pages — all free, no credit card, no friction. When the shutdown email hit my inbox, I went looking for a replacement and couldn't find one I was happy with.
So I built StatusPulse.
This is the story of what I built, how it went, and what surprised me along the way.
The gap Freshping left behind
Most of the "Freshping alternatives" people recommended fell into one of two buckets:
Bucket 1: Worse free tiers. UptimeRobot drops you to 5-minute check intervals on the free plan. For a production API, that means you can be down for up to 5 minutes before you know about it. Freshping was 1-minute. That matters.
Bucket 2: Enterprise pricing. Datadog, New Relic, Pingdom — all excellent products, all priced for DevOps teams with budgets. I'm a solo founder. I don't have a budget, I have a side project and a credit card I'm trying not to use.
The gap I kept hitting: 1-minute uptime checks + public status pages + no enterprise pricing. That's a surprisingly specific combination that barely existed in the market once Freshping was gone.
What I built
StatusPulse does two things:
- Monitors your URLs every 60 seconds and alerts you (email, Slack, SMS) the moment something breaks
- Generates a public status page at a shareable URL — so your users know what's happening without emailing you
The tech stack is deliberately boring: Next.js 15, SQLite via Turso for the database, Resend for email, deployed on Vercel. I didn't want infrastructure surprises.
The one non-obvious decision was multi-location false-positive protection. Single-node uptime monitors are noisy — if one AWS region has a bad minute, you get paged at 3am for an "outage" that wasn't real. StatusPulse runs checks from multiple locations and only fires an alert when a majority of check locations confirm the problem. This alone reduced false-positive alerts to near zero in testing.
What surprised me
1. The MVP was done at week 2. I kept building anyway.
The core feature — "check a URL, alert me when it's down" — was working by week 2. I spent another month adding things before I launched.
In retrospect: the thing Freshping refugees actually needed was "1-minute checks + status page." That was done at week 2. Everything else I added (webhook support, team plans, SMS alerts) was future-proofing for users I didn't have yet.
Launch sooner. Seriously.
2. "Just use Uptime Kuma" is a valid answer — for a different audience
Uptime Kuma came up in every thread where I mentioned StatusPulse. It's a great open-source self-hosted option and I have no beef with it.
But "spin up a server, install Docker, maintain your own infrastructure" is a real cost for a solo founder who just wants to know when their app is down. The audience for StatusPulse is people who want monitoring without managing another thing. Different tradeoff.
3. The Freshping angle is a real acquisition channel
Freshping's shutdown left a lot of people actively looking for replacements. Reddit threads, Twitter posts, dev forums — there's a steady stream of people asking "what should I use instead?" every week. That's an acquisition channel most uptime monitoring tools don't have access to.
If you're building a competitor product to something that just shut down, go find every "what's the alternative to X?" thread you can and answer helpfully. Don't spam. Just be there when people are already looking.
4. Flat pricing converts better than per-seat pricing for this market
I originally planned tiered pricing based on monitor count and check frequency. After talking to early users, I simplified it: Free (3 monitors), Pro ($9/mo flat, 20 monitors), Team ($29/mo flat, unlimited).
The indie dev market is extremely price-sensitive and extremely allergic to "pricing that scales with usage." They've been burned by per-seat SaaS before. Flat pricing, clearly communicated, is a meaningful differentiator.
Where it is now
StatusPulse is live at statuspulse.app. Early users are monitoring in production. I'm building in public and actively shipping based on feedback.
If you lost your Freshping setup and haven't found a replacement yet — it's free to try, no credit card required, takes 2 minutes to set up. If you sign up today you'll get Pro features free for 30 days as a launch special.
And if you're building something yourself: the "fill the gap left by a shutdown" niche is real. I'd recommend it.
Questions? AMA in the comments. I'm happy to dig into the technical decisions, the launch strategy, or the business model.
Top comments (0)