Why we built it
Every product these days runs on top of other people's products. When Stripe has a payment processing issue, your checkout breaks. When OpenAI has a capacity problem, your chatbot stops answering. When a CDN has trouble in one region, half your users can't reach you.
The way most teams find out is the same: a customer emails to say something is broken, you scramble to figure out whether it's you or one of the dozen vendors you sit on top of, and by the time you've worked out it isn't your fault, the incident has been running for twenty minutes and the support queue is filling up.
The existing tools in this space do the job. They also tend to price for enterprise procurement. A two-person team building a side project shouldn't need an enterprise contract to find out GitHub Actions is degraded.
Pingoru is the same idea, run on a budget that makes sense for indie hackers and small teams. Check every public status page on a tight cadence. Translate the wildly different formats into one common shape. Send a clear message when something breaks.
How it works
Each status page we monitor gets fetched on a 5-minute cycle. We parse what comes back into a normalised shape, so a Partial Outage on AWS reads the same as a Partial Outage on Stripe, even though the two vendors describe them in completely different ways under the hood.
When something changes (a new incident posted, a service flipping from healthy to degraded, an incident finally resolved), we route the alert wherever you've asked us to: email, Slack, Discord, Teams, PagerDuty, or a webhook of your own.
You pick the providers, the specific services within them (AWS EC2 in us-east-1 only, say, instead of the whole AWS catalog), and which event types should fire alerts. Filters are honoured strictly. No blanket spam.
What we believe
- The right alert beats more alerts. If you're getting paged for things you don't actually depend on, the signal gets buried under the noise. Per-component filtering exists because of this, not as a Premium upsell.
- Status data is public. Tooling around it should be cheap. Vendors publish their status pages for free. The value of an aggregator is convenience, not access. Pricing reflects that.
- Plain emails work. No marketing dashboards in the alert body. No "click here to view in our portal" gates. The relevant information sits in the email, with a link to the live timeline if you want more.
- Boring infrastructure is a feature. Pingoru runs on a single small instance in Canada with a public health endpoint. Nothing exotic. Nothing that needs a dedicated SRE at 3am.
- Independence is worth keeping. No external funding means no growth-at-all-cost pressure and no pivot to an acquirer's roadmap. The product can stay focused on the job it set out to do.
What we don't do
- No advertising trackers on the marketing site, ever.
- No selling, renting, or sharing your data with third parties.
- No training machine-learning models on your subscription data.
- No "Contact sales for pricing." Free is free; Premium is $15.
- No surprise upsells to an enterprise tier you didn't ask about.
- No dark-pattern billing. Cancel any time, fully self-serve.
Who runs it
Pingoru is built and operated independently, out of Canada. Every feature on the roadmap is there because it makes the tool more useful, not because it juices a metric for the next investor update.
The bug list is short. The changelog is honest. The support inbox gets answered the same day.
Get in touch
Found a bug? Want a provider added? Have feedback that doesn't fit anywhere else? Drop us a line. Every message gets read, and replies usually go out within 48 hours (business days only).