Really nice hack. Unrelated, by I checked out your startup https://hund.io. My question is... Why not just use https://StatusPage.io? They are launched, funded, refined, and the de-facto standard. What is your value prop?
This is exactly the developer behavior that can cause a good startup to fail. Stop trying to optimize every penny! Optimize what matters. Your business.
Sure, you can spin up two, three, four instances in AWS across multiple availability zones. Sure, you can install Ubuntu and manage servers. Sure, you can setup an ELB, or maybe you go the extra yard and configure NGINX. Sure you can deploy an open source rails or node status page app. All wasted energy and wasted cycles that should have been utilized on your idea directly.
I've seen this attitude of extreme frugalness/cheapness and it seems to be a trait that engineers are almost proud of, and brag about. Toxic behavior.
Disclosure: I am myself an engineer, but also founder.
If we had millions of venture dollars, I might agree with you. When you're a small team with a small budget, those costs add up. We absolutely spend money on the things that matter, but as CEO I also have to worry about minimizing the costs that don't.
Serving a lower price point is a perfectly valid strategy.
That said, I agree with you that there is a reason their pricing is high. It's a more profitable business. Unless you're Netflix it's hard to build a business charging $10/mo. So compete on price, sure, but it can't hurt to find a few rough spots on their product that you can improve. When we launched cronitor.io we at first competed on price but we also had objectively better technology: faster alerting, etc. As we've developed the product we've been able to charge more and it's worked out well.