I agree with this. Awesome service that you probably could scale up with properly with larger corporations while keeping the smaller individual projects/startups that use 3-10 tasks at lower costs or even free.
I know I could use this for 3 things on my own, but would probably rather just build it myself than pay $19/month. (although that is definitely more than reasonable if I wasn't using this for just independent projects)
Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.
I get what you're saying, but I think you're being overly skeptical. If you've already got a system for monitoring tasks in place, there's no reason you couldn't run both. And if you don't have a system in place, then if it fails you'll be no worse off than having never signed up.
I think most SLAs for these types of services are mostly pointless anyway. If something important to your business goes down, are you really going to be worried about whether or not you have to pay the $19?
RE: SLA... the use case is more "I want to know sooner than later that something didn't happen" than "Something didn't happen this minute, I want to know NOW!". If and when we go down, your task won't be able to check in and we'll end up sending you a false "positive" which is better than not knowing at all when something fails.
Actually, false positives with alarms are really, really bad - I will start to ignore them very quickly if they're not reliable indicators of an actual problem.
EDIT: If you have reasonable default tolerances or the ability to set tolerances on tasks, I'm pretty interested in trying it out - do you integrate or have plans to integrate with pagerduty, or do you simply fire off an email?
What I'm saying is, in the rare chance we are down and your service can't check in, that one time we would send a false positive. We wouldn't be flapping between off and on sending you a lot of false positives. The resolution on our checks is so large (the smallest is an hour) that we won't be flooding you with emails in any case.
We don't replace something like monit to make sure your process continues to run, we are validation that one-off periodic things run... things that are easy to forget about but are important.
Yeah, I'm not terribly worried by that kind of failure, if that happens, a bunch of other things have already gone wrong. I would like something to keep track of all processes, though, that can back up monit. Good to know it's got some slack in the tolerances, I'll give it a try.
The pricing is more based on value. It is the price my clients said they would be more than willing to pay to never have to panic again when there is some EC2 problem and the backups stopped working weeks ago.
I understand that. It's just not that valuable for my personal projects.
I'd go further and say, that most of people willing to pay that much (serious about their backups and availability) already have some solution in place.
The service is very appealing for people, who don't really care that much (because it's very easy to use). I'm afraid that those people won't pay $19/mo.
Then you have the clients no one else wants (maybe that's why you have that username?). You can keep them.
Smart people go after customers willing to pay more.
Actually, I have some old cheap clients I fired some time ago... Should I send them your way? They need someone to yell at and then laugh at when the cost of their needs are quoted.
I know I could use this for 3 things on my own, but would probably rather just build it myself than pay $19/month. (although that is definitely more than reasonable if I wasn't using this for just independent projects)