Opportunities › Affordable network monitoring for small projects › Proposed app
Pingpenny
Pay-per-monitor uptime checks for side projects and small teams
- Score
- 43
- confidence 46
- Evidence
- 4
- items on the page
- Rivals
- 1
- named in sources
- First version
- 25 d
- estimate
- Type
- Desktop and mobile
- PWA: on computers and phones alike
- Market since
- 2010
- Mature market · AI estimate
ScreensConcept
Desktop and mobile: Setup and analysis happen at a desk, but receiving alerts and checking status pages happens on mobile; both are essential to the service. Sample screens on a computer and a phone, in the proposed brand. Their numbers are sample data.
Monitors
1 incident open11 of 12 up
About this appAI proposal
Pingpenny watches your websites, APIs and servers and tells you when one stops answering. You pay for the monitors you actually use, one by one, instead of a flat plan built for a company.
It is made for developers and small teams who run side projects and other non-critical services. Many build their own checks or go without, because commercial plans cost more than the projects are worth.
Setup takes a minute: add a URL or host, pick how often to check, choose where alerts go. One status view shows what is up and what is not. No seat limits and no enterprise extras to pay for.
- Tagline
- Know when it's down. Pay pennies, not plans.
- Voice
- PlainFrugalCalmDirect
- Why this name
- A ping is the basic network check, and a penny is the price scale it aims for. Two plain words, easy to say and spell.
In the first version
Members say which features they would use. It tells PWAS what people want; it changes no score.
Pay per monitor
Add one monitor or fifty. The bill follows the count, so a small project never pays for capacity it does not use.
No member yet
HTTP, ping and port checks
Check a web page, a host or a TCP port. Set expected status codes or a keyword that must appear on the page.
No member yet
Alerts where you already are
Get push on your phone, email, or a webhook. Alerts wait for two failed checks to cut false alarms.
No member yet
One-screen status view
See every monitor, its last result and 30-day uptime on one installable screen that works on phone and desktop.
No member yet
Brand identityAI proposal
Check the name against trademark registers before using it.
Palette
#0F4C5CDeep Teal · primary#FAF6EFWarm Paper · surface#1B2528Ink · text#D9822BCopper · accent#2E8B57Signal Green · status up#C2412DAlarm Red · status down
Typography
Aa
Pingpenny
PricingAI proposal
Verified: Uptime Robot's pricing page lists one paid plan at €41 a month plus a free plan. The $0.25 per monitor rate comes from a public claim on Hacker News. Free tier size is a starting point to test.
Free
Free
- Up to 5 monitors
- 5-minute checks
- Email alerts
Per monitor
$0.25 a month
- Price per monitor beyond the free ones
- 1-minute checks
- Push, email and webhook alerts
- Public status page
Would you pay Per monitor · $0.25 a month?
Your answer tells PWAS which prices people accept. It changes no score.
No answers yet.
What it could be worthEstimate
What a software business making this much sells for today, from real deals. Pick a monthly revenue.
If it makes
Worth about
$194,000
Sale range $132,000 to $263,000
$120,000 a year in revenue
From 87 software businesses listed and sold on Empire Flippers in the last year, revenue vetted by the broker: they sell for about 19× their monthly revenue, most between 13× and 26×.
Measured on profit, the middle deal is 32× monthly net profit: about 2.7 years of profit.
An estimate, not an offer or financial advice. A real price depends on profit, growth, churn, how much of the work is the owner's, and the buyer.
How it would growAI proposal
How the product would reach new customers through its own use, and how the first ones would be found. A plan to test, not a result.
- Built-in loop
- Shared outputs. Users publish a status page for their project. Visitors see a small 'Monitored by Pingpenny' link on the page, which leads to the sign-up.
- Do they become customers?
- Visitors to status pages are often other developers and could become customers, but this is untested. Test the click-to-sign-up rate on free status pages.
- First customers
- Solo developers who run 5 to 30 side projects or small self-hosted services and currently use homemade scripts or no monitoring.
- Where to reach them
- Hacker News and Show HN: Post a launch thread in the discussions where the price complaint appeared, with the per-monitor price up front.
- Self-hosting communities: Share in homelab and indie developer forums, offering the free tier for a few monitors.
- First milestone
- Fifty sign-ups and ten paying users with at least 10 monitors each within eight weeks of launch.
Why people already pay for this
- Public claimExisting uptime monitoring tools are priced for enterprise customers and unaffordable for small-scale users.
- Public claimThere is market demand for affordable per-monitor pricing in network monitoring.
- Public claimIndividuals and small teams with non-critical services lack suitable monitoring tools.
- VerifiedUptime Robot's pricing page lists 1 paid plan, at €41 a month, plus a free plan
Tech stack
Every proposal builds on the same PWA base, installable from the browser on any phone or computer. Dashed boxes are what this app adds.
- AppNext.js and TypeScript
- PWAManifest and service worker
- UITailwind CSS
- Data and authSupabase Postgres
- PaymentsStripe
- EmailResend
- HostingVercel
- This app · Check schedulerBackground job workers on a small serverRuns HTTP, ping and port checks on a schedule, reliably and apart from the web app.
- This app · Push notificationsWeb Push with VAPID keysAlerts must reach phones quickly, which the PWA needs web push for.
RisksAI inference
- CommercialAt $0.25 per monitor, revenue per customer is tiny. Many users may stay on the free tier, so costs and support must stay very low.
- TechnicalA monitor that is itself unreliable or gives false alarms loses trust fast. Probes need redundancy and careful retry logic.
- PlatformPush alerts on iOS PWAs depend on the user installing the app, and delivery can be less dependable than native apps.
- CommercialEvidence of demand is public claims from forum comments. Willingness to pay at this price is unverified.
Everything marked AI proposal or AI inference was written by a model from the evidence on the opportunity page. The proposed name must be checked against trademark registers before it is used.