Last week, the OpenAI API started returning 503s at 2 AM. My app's AI features were broken for 45 minutes before I noticed.
I checked Downdetector — nothing. No reports. No spike. Because Downdetector tracks consumer services, not developer APIs. The people who use ChatGPT through the website weren't affected. The developers hitting api.openai.com were.
That gap is why I built API Status Check.
The Problem With Downdetector for Developers
Downdetector is crowd-sourced. Regular users report problems. This works great for "is Netflix down?" but terrible for "is the Stripe API returning elevated 5xx errors?"
Here's what's missing:
No API endpoint monitoring. Downdetector checks if a service exists. It doesn't ping api.stripe.com/v1/charges to see if it responds in 200ms or 8 seconds.
No response time data. "Up" vs "down" is a false binary. An API responding in 5 seconds is technically up but practically broken for your users. You need response time charts.
No provider comparisons. Choosing between SendGrid and Mailgun? OpenAI and Anthropic? Downdetector can't tell you which has better historical uptime.
No developer integrations. No embeddable badges, no webhooks, no Slack notifications. Downdetector's API is enterprise-only.
What Developer-Focused Monitoring Looks Like
I wanted something that answers the questions I actually have:
- "Is the Stripe API slow right now, or is it my code?"
- "Which AI API has been more reliable this month?"
- "Show me OpenAI's incident history so I can plan my fallback strategy"
So API Status Check monitors 100+ APIs with:
Actual endpoint pings
Every 5 minutes, we hit real API endpoints. Not homepages, not status pages — the actual URLs your code calls.
Response time tracking
See current response time plus 24-hour charts. Catch degradation before it becomes downtime.
Stripe API: 187ms ✅
OpenAI API: 342ms ✅
Discord API: 89ms ✅
GitHub API: 1,247ms ⚠️ ← something's up
"Is X Down?" pages
Quick answers with FAQ schema that Google loves:
Side-by-side comparisons
Real data for vendor decisions:
Embeddable badges
Drop these in your README or status page:
Incident history from official status pages
Full outage timelines pulled from Statuspage.io:
When to Use What
| Scenario | Tool |
|---|---|
| "Is Instagram down?" | Downdetector |
| "Is the Stripe API responding?" | API Status Check |
| "Is MY server down?" | UptimeRobot |
| "Compare API reliability" | API Status Check |
| "Alert me when AWS reports an incident" | StatusGator |
It's Free
No signup. No API key needed for badges. Just go check your APIs:
Monitoring 100+ APIs including Stripe, OpenAI, Discord, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, Twilio, and more. Built for developers who are tired of finding out about API outages from angry users.
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