I Built an Uptime Monitor in a Weekend — And Saved $180/Year

I was paying $15/month for Uptime Robot. I used maybe 30% of it — basic HTTP checks on a handful of endpoints, email alerts when something went down, and a status page nobody really looked at. That's $180/year for a glorified cron job. So I built my own. In a weekend. Here's exactly how, what I learned, and whether you should do the same. Why Build Your Own? Let's be clear: Uptime Robot, Pingdom, and friends are excellent services. If you're running production infrastructure at scale, use them.