You just wrapped up a sprint. Things were stable all week. Then out of nowhere, the app slows down. Users start writing in—Slack notifications from support won’t stop. A few minutes later, everything recovers, but the questions keep coming. “Was it us or you?” “Is it safe to deploy?” “What happened?”
That’s usually when founders realize they need a status page. Not because it solves the problem, but because it gives people a way to know what’s going on without chasing down your team.
A status page isn’t something most SaaS founders think about early. It’s one of those tools that feels optional—until it doesn’t.
What a Status Page Does
At its core, a status page shows whether your service is working as expected. It’s a single, public (or private) location where users can check if there are ongoing issues, see past incidents, and follow updates when something is wrong.
Some status pages are completely manual. Your team posts an update when something breaks. Others are connected to your monitoring tools, automatically flagging downtime or degraded performance. Good ones do both—automating updates when possible, and allowing human input when needed.
When all systems are operational, the page gives peace of mind. When something breaks, it becomes a communication channel. That’s where its real value kicks in. Customers don’t need to guess, and your support team isn’t buried under identical tickets.
Why SaaS Founders Should Care
Outages are inevitable. Even with great engineering, things will fail—cloud provider issues, database hiccups, bad deploys. What matters is how you respond.
Without a status page, your team is stuck answering the same question again and again. Customers feel ignored, even if you're working around the clock to fix things. They don’t know what’s happening, how serious it is, or when to expect a resolution.
A good status page won’t prevent churn, but it slows the panic. It shows that you're present, transparent, and in control of the situation. Over time, this builds trust.
For early-stage teams, this can be a quiet advantage. Larger customers will often check if you have a status page before signing. They’ve been burned before. They want visibility when things go wrong. If you wait too long to offer that, they’ll go elsewhere.
What Good Status Pages Include
At a minimum, your status page should show current system health and past incidents. But that’s just the start.
Mature setups break down services into components. If the app is fine but billing is down, users should see that. Some platforms let you link third-party services like Stripe, AWS, or SendGrid. That way, if an upstream provider is having problems, your users see it without you needing to explain everything manually.
Updates matter too. A timeline of what happened, what you’re doing, and what’s next helps users stay informed without refreshing Slack or Twitter. Clear timestamps and human-readable messages go further than technical jargon or silence.
Some teams go a step further and let users subscribe to updates—via email, RSS, or even SMS. Others run internal status pages, so engineering and customer success teams can get a more detailed view without cluttering the public one.
The best pages aren’t flashy. They’re clear, consistent, and easy to scan. Most importantly, they’re kept up to date. Nothing erodes trust faster than a status page that says “all systems operational” while users are stuck with 502 errors.
If you're looking for a simple way to build and maintain a reliable status page without extra work, StatusRay makes it easy to monitor third-party vendors and keep your customers informed in real time.
Misconceptions About Status Pages
There’s a common belief that status pages are only needed at scale. If you only have 50 customers, it’s easy to send a quick email, right? But early-stage teams often feel outages more acutely. One bad experience can push a new customer to churn or cancel a trial. You don’t get as many second chances.
Another mistake is treating status pages as a tool for big outages only. In reality, they’re just as useful for small issues—slower performance in one region, degraded search, delays in email notifications. These aren’t full outages, but they matter to your users. When you acknowledge them quickly, you avoid confusion and support overhead.
Cost of Not Having One
When your service fails and you don’t have a clear way to communicate, users are left in the dark. They open tickets. They post on X. They message your support team. The issue might be fixed in 10 minutes, but the noise lasts much longer.
You don’t want your engineers typing incident reports in Slack while patching a production issue. And you don’t want your CS team refreshing internal dashboards trying to figure out if they should respond to customers yet.
A status page saves time when things are going wrong. It gives users confidence that you’re aware and working on the problem. Without one, silence becomes your default—and that’s where trust erodes.
Building Trust Through Visibility
For SaaS teams, uptime matters. But transparency during downtime matters just as much.
A status page won’t stop incidents from happening. But it will shape how your users experience them. It shows that your team communicates clearly, even under pressure. That kind of trust isn’t built during the good times—it’s earned when things break.
Don’t wait for the first major outage to set one up.
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