A status page can cost about $1 a month in software and hosting if you pair an inexpensive uptime monitor with a custom static site. That was the approach in a November 2020 example by Shivansh Vij: five website or API checks, checked every five minutes, were reported to cost $0.80 monthly, while the status page itself was hosted on GitHub Pages. The figure is historical, and it excludes the time spent building and maintaining the page.
Where the $1-a-month figure came from
In a November 30, 2020 Indie Hackers post, Shivansh Vij described combining paid monitoring with a custom static status page. He reported paying $0.80 per month to monitor five APIs or websites at five-minute intervals and said the plan included two months free. That is a first-person historical price and promotion, not a current quote.
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The page used Nuxt.js and TailwindCSS, with uptime data supplied by updown.io. Vij said the page was hosted on GitHub Pages. The reported cash cost therefore covered the monitoring arrangement, not the developer time involved in creating or maintaining the custom site.
How the setup worked
Monitoring and uptime graphs
The monitoring service checked the selected websites or APIs and supplied data for uptime graphs on the status page. The five-minute interval was part of Vij’s 2020 example; the right interval for another service depends on how quickly its team needs to detect and communicate a problem.
The updown.io product page provides current service information, but the material available here does not establish its current pricing. Do not use the 2020 $0.80 figure to budget for a new account.
Static page and incident updates
The public-facing page was a custom static site rather than a complete hosted status-page product. Vij said it used Nuxt Content so incidents, maintenance notices, and investigations could be created in Markdown. This provides control over the page’s CSS and presentation, but also means the team must own the publishing workflow and keep the site working.
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What a low cash price leaves out
- Build and upkeep: Free hosting does not make a custom page free to develop. Someone has to build the design, connect monitoring data, publish updates, and maintain the code.
- Subscriber notifications: Vij’s page did not let customers subscribe to automatic downtime notifications. He preferred sending emails manually, avoiding subscriber-based fees at the cost of extra work and a less automated alert path.
- Operational needs: Check that the monitoring interval and graph history are useful for your incident response, and that your team can publish both outages and planned maintenance promptly.
How it compares with a bundled status-page service
Prices are only comparable when their billing units and included features match. For example, OneUptime’s pricing page, accessed October 7, 2026, lists a free plan with one status page and 100 subscribers, active monitoring starting at $1 per monitor per month, Growth at $22, and Scale at $99. These are vendor-published prices and plan details can change.
Those figures do not directly compare with Vij’s arrangement: the 2020 post described five monitored services at a stated monthly price, while OneUptime prices active monitoring per monitor and bundles status-page features by plan. Check what each plan includes before comparing totals.
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| Approach | What the cited example establishes | What to weigh |
|---|---|---|
| Custom static page plus separate monitor | Vij’s 2020 example paired a GitHub Pages site with monitoring data; the reported monitoring charge was $0.80 monthly for five checks every five minutes, with two months free. | More design control and a Markdown incident workflow, but development and upkeep take time; the page lacked automatic subscriber alerts. |
| Bundled status-page service | OneUptime’s pricing page, accessed October 7, 2026, lists one status page and 100 subscribers on its free plan; active monitoring starts at $1 per monitor per month. | Review the current plan caps, monitoring unit, subscriber allowance, alert options, and any costs required for the features you need. |
When the low-cost custom route makes sense
A static page paired with separate monitoring can suit a technically comfortable team that values custom styling, can publish incidents itself, and does not need automatic subscriber alerts. A hosted service may be a better fit when a team wants subscriber management and status-page operations bundled together, provided its plan meets the required monitoring and notification needs.
There is no industry-wide average cost established by these examples. Treat the $1-a-month story as a specific historical implementation, then price a current setup by checking monitoring charges, hosting, the labor to maintain a custom page, subscriber alerts, and the features included in any bundled plan.
Quick Recap
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