Why We Built API Status Check (And Why Downdetector Isn't Enough for Developers)

TLDR: The story behind API Status Check — why we built a free, developer-first status aggregator for 100+ APIs. Born from frustration with Downdetector's consumer focus and scattered vendor status pages.

I built API Status Check after wasting two hours debugging an OpenAI outage.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. My AI-powered feature stopped working. The logs showed timeout errors. My code hadn't changed. I restarted the service, checked the database, reviewed recent commits, and even rolled back a deployment that had nothing to do with the issue.

Two hours later, a teammate sent a link to status.openai.com. It had been down the entire time.

That's when I realized: I had monitoring for everything except the things I didn't control. UptimeRobot told me my server was up. Sentry told me my code was throwing errors. But nobody told me that OpenAI — the API my entire feature depended on — was broken.

The Problem Nobody Was Solving

I checked Downdetector. It confirmed OpenAI was down... based on crowdsourced reports from angry users. By the time Downdetector showed a spike, the outage was already 45 minutes old. And Downdetector is designed for consumers — "is Netflix down?" — not for developers managing 15 API dependencies in a production stack.

What I wanted was simple:

1. One dashboard showing every API my product depends on
2. Instant alerts when something changes — not 45 minutes later
3. Developer-friendly integrations — Slack webhooks, Discord, RSS, a JSON API
4. Status badges I could embed in READMEs and dashboards

I looked for this product. It didn't exist. There were enterprise monitoring platforms that cost hundreds per month. There were status page aggregators that covered 10 services. There was Downdetector, which is great for checking if Fortnite is down but terrible for DevOps workflows.

So I built it.

Starting With a List of 30 APIs

The first version of API Status Check monitored 30 APIs. The ones I personally depended on: OpenAI, Stripe, Supabase, Vercel, GitHub, Cloudflare, and a handful of others.

The tech was straightforward: poll official status pages, normalize the data, and display it on a dashboard. But the details mattered:

Status page scraping is messy. Every vendor uses a different format. Some use Atlassian Statuspage (nice, consistent API). Some use custom pages with no structured data. Some update their status page 30 minutes after an outage starts. Some never update it at all.

Normalization was the hard part. Turning "We are investigating elevated error rates in the us-east-1 region" into a clean "degraded" status required parsing dozens of different formats, handling edge cases, and building confidence scoring so we don't false-alarm on maintenance windows.

Speed was non-negotiable. If I wanted to beat Downdetector, I needed to detect status changes within 60 seconds, not 60 minutes.

Growing to 100+ APIs

Once I had the core working, the question became: what should we monitor?

I started with what developers actually use. Not what's popular on Downdetector (where the top services are social media and gaming platforms), but what production applications depend on:

• AI/ML: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Hugging Face, Replicate
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, Square, Plaid
• Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare
• Communication: Twilio, SendGrid, Slack, Discord
• Developer Tools: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Linear
• Databases: MongoDB Atlas, Supabase, PlanetScale, Firebase

Today we monitor 100+ APIs — and the list grows based on what users request.

Why Free?

People ask why API Status Check is free. The answer is simple: the value of the product increases with adoption.

When more developers use API Status Check, we get:

• Better outage detection (more eyes, faster confirmation)
• More API coverage requests (users tell us what to add)
• A community that shares outage information in real-time

We auto-post every detected outage to Twitter and Bluesky. The community benefits even if they never visit our dashboard.

The monetization plan involves premium features for teams — custom API monitoring, historical analytics, SLA tracking — but the core dashboard and alerts will always be free.

What Makes Us Different from Downdetector

I respect Downdetector. They pioneered crowdsourced outage detection. But they're solving a different problem:

	Downdetector	API Status Check
Audience	Consumers ("is Netflix down?")	Developers ("is Stripe's API down?")
Detection	Crowdsourced user reports	Automated status page monitoring
Speed	Depends on report volume	< 60 seconds
APIs covered	Consumer services + some B2B	Developer APIs and infrastructure
Integrations	None	Discord, Slack, RSS, JSON API, webhooks
Status badges	No	Yes (embed in READMEs)
API access	No	Yes (full JSON API)
Price	Free (ad-supported)	Free (no ads)

Downdetector is the right tool if you want to know if Instagram is down. API Status Check is the right tool if you want to know if the APIs your production application depends on are down — and you want to know before your users do.

What I've Learned Building This

1. Developer tools sell themselves through utility

We've never run a paid ad. Our growth comes from people googling "is OpenAI down" during an outage and finding our page. They bookmark it, set up alerts, and tell their team. The product IS the marketing.

2. Content is a moat

We publish in-depth guides for every API we monitor — what to do when it goes down, how to implement fallbacks, how to set up alerts. This content ranks in search, gets cited by AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity), and establishes us as the authority on API reliability.

3. Speed wins

During an outage, the first source to confirm "yes, it's down" gets the traffic and the trust. Being 30 minutes faster than Downdetector isn't just a feature — it's the entire value proposition.

4. The developer community is generous

When we post outage alerts on Twitter and Bluesky, developers share them. When we publish a guide, developers link to it. Building in public and giving away useful tools creates a flywheel of goodwill that no marketing budget can buy.

What's Next

We're working on:

• Email notification subscriptions — subscribe to specific APIs you care about
• Historical uptime data — track reliability trends over time
• Custom API monitoring — add your own private APIs to the dashboard
• More APIs — we add new ones every week based on user requests

If you depend on third-party APIs (and you do), I built this for you. Stop debugging other people's outages.

Check your API dependencies →

---

API Status Check monitors 100+ APIs in real-time. Free forever for individual developers. Set up alerts in 2 minutes →