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A status page can cost about $1 a month in software and hosting when you pair a low-cost uptime monitor with a custom static site. That was the setup described by Shivansh Vij in a November 30, 2020 Indie Hackers post: five websites or APIs checked every five minutes, a custom Nuxt.js page hosted on GitHub Pages, and a reported monitoring charge of $0.80 per month. It was a dated example—not a current price quote—and it did not count the time spent building or maintaining the page.
How the roughly $1-a-month setup worked
Vij’s approach separated two jobs that hosted status-page products often bundle: checking whether services are up, and displaying their status to customers. He used updown.io for monitoring and built a separate static status page. The Indie Hackers post describes this as an alternative for someone seeking more control over the page’s CSS and design than they felt some hosted options offered. Read the original Indie Hackers post.
- Monitoring: updown.io checked five websites or APIs every five minutes. Vij reported a charge of $0.80 per month and two months free. That was his first-person account in 2020, not a verified current rate.
- Page and hosting: The page was a custom static site built with Nuxt.js and TailwindCSS and hosted on GitHub Pages. The post describes the hosting as free.
- Data and incidents: The page used monitoring data to show uptime graphs. The author says incidents, including maintenance notices and downtime investigations, could be written in Markdown using Nuxt Content. The page was open source.
The arithmetic behind the headline was therefore a low monitoring bill plus free hosting—not a full accounting of the work. The original post does not quantify development or ongoing maintenance hours, so it cannot establish the total economic cost of running a comparable page.
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The $0.80 monitoring figure and two-month-free offer belong to the 2020 post. The current updown.io product page provides product context, but the information available here does not establish its current price. Check the provider’s current terms before budgeting; do not treat the old amount as an offer you can still buy. updown.io product page.
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There is no established industry-wide average status-page cost in the available figures. Vij’s post is one implementation, while current vendors may package monitoring, status pages, and customer notifications differently. A listed price is meaningful only alongside its billing unit and included limits.
What to compare before choosing a status-page approach
Compare the operating model and the work involved, not just the number in a monthly price. A static page can offer design control, but you need a dependable way to collect monitoring data, publish incidents, and keep the page current.
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- Billing unit and monitoring coverage: Find out whether the provider charges per check, per monitor, or through a bundled plan. Confirm how many services you need to watch and the check interval included.
- Graphs and history: Check whether the monitoring interval and historical data are detailed enough for the uptime graphs you intend to show.
- Design and hosting: A custom static site can give you control over CSS and page layout. Account for the time required to build, deploy, and maintain it, even if hosting has no cash charge.
- Incident publishing: Decide how your team will post outages, investigations, and planned maintenance. Markdown-based publishing can be convenient, but it still needs an owner and a clear update process.
- Subscriber notifications: Verify whether customers can subscribe to automatic alerts, and whether subscriber caps or delivery limits apply.
- Plan limits: Check current free allowances, monitor counts, status-page counts, and subscriber limits on the plan you would actually use.
The notification trade-off in the original example
The custom page described in the post did not let customers subscribe to automatic downtime alerts. Vij preferred to email customers manually and viewed that as a way to avoid per-subscriber fees. That was his chosen trade-off, not a universal recommendation: manual messages may fit a small service with few incidents, but they require someone to notice the issue and communicate reliably.
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OneUptime’s pricing page, accessed October 7, 2026, lists one status page and 100 subscribers on its free plan. It lists active monitoring starting at $1 per monitor per month, Growth at $22, and Scale at $99. These are vendor-published figures and may change. They are not directly comparable with Vij’s per-check arrangement, and the listed Growth and Scale figures should not be treated as the cost of an equivalent setup without checking what each plan includes. OneUptime pricing.
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For a custom static page, estimate the monitor charges and your implementation and maintenance effort separately. For a bundled service, compare the plan’s monitoring coverage, subscriber features, and page limits with what you need. The 2020 example shows one way to keep cash spending low; it does not show that every status page can be run for $1 per month.
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