Build vs Buy: Should You Build Your Own Uptime Monitoring?

Every developer has had this thought. You're setting up monitoring and you look at the $9/month price and think: I could just write a curl script. Let me save the money.

You could. But let's look at what you'd actually be building.

What a cron job approach gives you

A basic self-built monitor: a cron job running every 5 minutes that curls your URL and sends an email if it gets a non-200 response.

*/5 * * * * curl -sf https://yourapp.com || \
  mail -s "Site down" you@example.com

This works. It will catch a sustained outage. But it has significant gaps:

• Single point of failure: the cron job runs on your server. If your server goes down, the check doesn't run. You won't know your site is down because your monitoring is also down.
• 5-minute resolution: the minimum cron interval is 1 minute, but cron startup overhead means effective minimum is 1–2 minutes. PingBase checks every minute from multiple locations.
• No status code validation: curl -sf considers any 2xx or 3xx as success. A 503 with a 200 wrapper would pass.
• No response time tracking: you can't see when your site is slow, or track performance trends over time.
• No content validation: a PHP error that returns 200 with an empty body passes the check.
• No SSL monitoring: your certificate can expire without triggering the curl check.
• No history: you have no record of past incidents unless you log everything yourself.
• No status page: when something goes down, there's nowhere to send users.

What you'd actually need to build

To get monitoring that's genuinely reliable and useful, here's what needs to be built:

External check infrastructure

Your monitoring cannot run on the same server as your application. When the server goes down, so does the monitoring. You need checks running from at least one external host — ideally multiple hosts in different regions so you can distinguish "your server is down" from "there's a network issue in one region."

This means: a separate VM (minimum $5–10/month), or a serverless function on a separate cloud provider, or multiple — if you want multi-region (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, etc.).

Alert deduplication and cooldowns

A check that fires once per failure will send you an email every minute while the site is down. You need logic to: send an alert when the site goes down, stay quiet during the outage, and send a recovery alert when it comes back up. This state needs to be stored somewhere persistent.

False positive suppression

A single failed check is often a network blip. You need to require N consecutive failures before alerting. More state to manage.

SSL certificate tracking

Separate from HTTP checks: connect to the TLS endpoint, extract the certificate expiry date, calculate days remaining, alert at 30/7 days. This requires a different check type entirely.

Check result storage and history

Store every check result: timestamp, status, response time, status code, error message if any. You'll want 90 days of history for trend analysis and incident review. A database, schema, and retention policy.

Public status page

A read-only page showing current status, uptime history (typically rendered as the 90-day bar chart), and incident timeline. Fast-loading even during incidents (so it can't depend on your main app's infrastructure). Custom domain support. Incident update posting.

Alert channels

Email is the minimum. Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty integrations each require separate webhook integrations. Each needs to be built, tested, and maintained as the upstream APIs change.

The real cost of building it yourself

At even a conservative $50/hour, the initial build cost is $750–$1,500. That's 83–166 months of PingBase Pro. And it's not a one-time cost — you'll fix bugs, update dependencies, and handle breakage whenever upstream APIs change or your infrastructure shifts.

When building your own is the right call

There are legitimate reasons to build custom monitoring:

• You need checks that no tool supports: a proprietary protocol, internal network checks that can't be reached from the public internet, or monitoring logic so specific that no general tool handles it.
• Regulatory requirements: data sovereignty requirements that prevent using any third-party service to check your infrastructure.
• You're building a monitoring product: then you're not replacing PingBase, you're building your own version of it — and you already know what that involves.

For every other case: the opportunity cost of building monitoring is time not spent on your actual product. A monitoring tool exists. It costs less per year than a few hours of your time. The "I'll just build it" instinct, while understandable, is the wrong call.