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Comment by lurk2 | Hacker News Reader

If the service has no monthly fee, how is it being paid for?

It's a one-time 4.99 fee (covers a year of monitoring or 50 downtime events).

That’s an annual subscription.

I suppose you're right, unless your server goes down more than 50 times. I saw it as credits that expire in a year, would be a bit scary to offer monitoring in perpetuity for $5 if they didn't expire.

Consider changing your landing page to reflect the price (“Only $5 Annually!”). The reason I asked was because the way it is now makes it look like the service is being offered for free, which made me think it was a phishing scheme.

I appreciate the feedback! Just implemented this, hadn't thought of that. Cheers.

interesting, how did you come up with the pricing? Similar other services?

Not quite - just thought of what I would actually pay for it. Looked at others and saw most done for you solutions were monthly subscriptions ~$9. Couldn't see myself being excited by that pricing model + another dashboard to manage, so I made it $5 for the year and built the most simple solution that's easy to set up and reliable (while not losing money).

Almost all monitoring services I found target enterprise, and the ones that don't are self-hosted. This solution is for the small teams/indie devs that just need to know when their servers down. Might raise the price though, thinking the low price might work against me for quality perception. What do you think?

I used a hobby tier service which would send free emails but you would buy credits for SMS. Now I do it myself with simple Cron script

One thing with the events model is that for some webhosts which do maintenance or small periods of downtime often a user might see many through the year. Or in other words the hobby dev might see them but I imagine a production level small team shouldn't be using those servers anyway

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