A status page does one thing: it tells your users whether your product is working. It sounds simple. But in practice, the difference between having one and not having one during an outage is the difference between users feeling informed and users feeling abandoned.
The good news: a functional status page can be set up in under 10 minutes, and the free tier of most tools is enough to cover early-stage SaaS products completely.
What a status page actually needs
A minimal status page has three things:
- Current status — is everything operational right now?
- Historical uptime — a 90-day uptime chart builds long-term trust
- Incident history — what went wrong, when, and how it was resolved
Nice-to-haves include email/SMS subscriptions (so users can opt in to outage alerts), maintenance windows (to proactively communicate planned downtime), and embeddable status widgets for your dashboard or navigation.
What to monitor
Don't just monitor your homepage. Users care about specific services failing, not just whether your main URL returns a 200. Here's a sensible set for most SaaS products:
The most important check. Monitors your primary user-facing endpoint.
If you have API customers, they care about API uptime separately.
Login failures are disproportionately frustrating — monitor separately.
A broken billing page blocks upgrades. Worth a dedicated check.
If your app loads assets from a CDN, test the CDN separately.
How to handle incidents
The communication during an incident matters as much as the technical resolution. Users who see regular status updates are significantly less likely to churn — even when the outage is long.
The moment you know something is wrong, post an update. "We're investigating an issue affecting X" — even before you know the cause.
Radio silence during an incident is worse than admitting you don't know what's wrong yet. Regular updates reassure users that you're working on it.
After resolution, post a brief explanation: what failed, why, and what you're doing to prevent recurrence. Users appreciate honesty.
Mark the incident resolved with a timestamp. This signals your monitoring is reliable — you track when things return to normal.
Setting up a free status page with ShipPulse
ShipPulse's free plan includes one project with a full status page — monitors, incidents, maintenance windows, and a public status page at status.shippulse.dev/your-project.
Here's the setup:
- Create a project — takes 30 seconds.
- Add monitors — Go to Status → Monitors → Add monitor. Enter the URL, check interval (default: 1 minute), and expected status code.
- Configure your status page — Set a name, description, and logo. Your page is immediately live.
- Add a status widget to your app — A one-line embed shows your current status in your navigation or footer.
Free options compared
If you're evaluating tools, here's how the free tiers compare for early-stage SaaS:
- ShipPulse — Free tier includes 1 project, full status page, monitors, incidents, and changelog + testimonials in the same subscription.
- Instatus — Free tier is available but limited to 1 status page with Instatus branding. Paid plans start at $20/mo.
- Betterstack — Free tier exists but focuses on log management; status pages require a paid plan ($29/mo).
- Upptime — Open-source, GitHub-based. Free but requires self-hosting and technical setup.
For most early-stage founders, ShipPulse's free tier is the right starting point — especially if you're not ready to pay for a standalone status page tool yet.
When to upgrade from free
The free tier is sufficient until you need custom domains (status.yourapp.com instead of status.shippulse.dev/your-project), email/SMS subscriptions for users, or multiple projects. All of those come with the $19/mo Starter plan.