Monitoring and alerting setup for small SaaS and web apps
I set up the checks that tell you your app is down, a certificate is about to expire, a disk is filling up or a nightly job silently stopped, and route those alerts to you. It’s for small teams without an ops person. From $260 ($200 founding), done in about a week. Email me your stack and hosting.
See a sample report, proposal and weekly update- Price
- from $260
- Founding
- from $200
- Timeline
- About 1 week
- Format
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Hours
- US Eastern Time, async
Who this is for.
A good fit if
- Founders who find out about outages from customers
- Small teams running one or two servers without an ops person
- Apps with scheduled jobs (backups, imports, billing runs) that nobody watches
Common triggers
- A customer emailed “is the site down?” before you knew
- A certificate or domain expired
- A backup or cron job had quietly stopped weeks ago
Not a fit if
- You want someone watching screens or answering pages at night. I don’t offer 24/7 or on-call.
- You need a full logging and tracing platform on day one (available only as a separately quoted add-on)
- You need uptime guarantees or an SLA
What I do, and what you get.
What I do
- List what can fail quietly in your setup and rank it, starting with the failures nothing else would notice
- Set up outside-in uptime checks (HTTP status plus a content check) from a service you own
- Add certificate and domain expiry warnings, for example 14 and 7 days before
- Add heartbeat checks for cron jobs and backups, so a job that stops running raises an alert
- Add disk, memory and load alerts on the server
- Standard: install Prometheus exporters, add app-level metrics (queue depth, error counts, job failures), write alert rules and build a simple Grafana dashboard
- Route every alert to your email or chat channel first, and test each one by triggering it
What you get
- Working checks and alerts, each one tested
- An alert runbook: what each alert means, how urgent it is and the first three things to check
- A one-page map of what is and isn’t monitored
- Handover notes with every account, login and threshold
Your part
- Server and DNS access, and a decision on where alerts go (email, Slack, SMS)
- Accounts for any hosted monitoring service in your name (free tiers usually suffice)
- A person on your side who reads alerts
Included
- Uptime, certificate, domain and heartbeat checks
- Server resource alerts
- Standard: Prometheus metrics, alert rules and one dashboard
- Alert runbook and handover
Not included
- 24/7 watching, on-call or pager duty
- Log aggregation and tracing (a quoted add-on)
- Fixing the problems the alerts find
- Monitoring service fees
Fixed prices, agreed before work starts.
Uptime, certificate and domain expiry, heartbeats, server alerts, runbook
Starter plus Prometheus, app metrics, alert rules and one dashboard
Build your scope
- Timeline
- About 1 week
- Payment
- Paid in full before work starts
- Earliest start
- Oct 5
Founding price: 3 of 7 spots left, until Mar 31, 2027 — one-off work, in return for a testimonial. How it works
Prices are in USD, paid by bank transfer against an invoice. Work under $1,000 is paid upfront; larger work is 50% to start and 50% before handover, or monthly milestones. How working together works
Variations
- Hosted checks
- A service in your account: fastest, with nothing extra to maintain.
- Self-hosted
- For example Uptime Kuma, run on a separate small server, never on the one it watches.
- Split setups
- App and database on separate servers: each node gets its own checks, so Standard is usually the right tier.
- Logs & tracing add-on
- Centralized logs and/or OpenTelemetry tracing, scoped per app and quoted after Standard is in place.
How it runs.
- 01
Send your setup
You email your stack, hosting and the last thing that broke unnoticed.
- 02
Fixed quote
I reply within one US business day with questions or a fixed quote.
- 03
Invoice and access
You pay the prepaid invoice, then grant access.
- 04
Set up and test-fire
I set up the checks, then trigger each alert to prove it reaches you.
- 05
Handover
You get a handover call or written walkthrough, plus the runbook.
Where I have done this before.
Licensing & Entitlement Platform
35 Prometheus metrics and a written alert guide.
Read the case study →SaaS · Cloud marketplace · Server automationWordPress Hosting Control Panel
About thirty automated health checks, including configuration-drift detection.
Read the case study →Questions buyers ask.
Will you respond when an alert fires?
Not as part of this service. Alerts go to you first. If you’d like me to look at them in working hours, that’s a Care Plan.
Do you guarantee uptime?
No. Monitoring tells you sooner; it doesn’t prevent outages.
Which tools do you use?
Whatever fits: a hosted uptime service, Healthchecks-style heartbeats, Uptime Kuma, Prometheus and Grafana. The accounts are yours.
Can you add logging later?
Yes, as a separately quoted add-on once the basics are in place.
Does monitoring slow my app down?
The checks and exporters are lightweight. I note any overhead in the handover.
Ask about Monitoring & Alerting.
Tell me what you have and where it hurts. I reply within one US business day with either a fixed quote or the entry step that makes a fixed quote possible.
Helpful to include
- App and stack
- Hosting (provider, how many servers)
- Scheduled jobs you rely on
- Where alerts should go
- What broke unnoticed recently
- Preferred start date