Software as a service
For status page tools: does the next big outage bring buyers, or only readers?
Status page and uptime tools sell to engineers and SaaS founders, and demand jumps when a large outage is in the news or a team's own incident went badly. Tally ties each plan to the visit that won it, so the days after an outage are judged by what was bought rather than by the traffic.
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01How they sell
- SubscriptionMonthly or yearly plans by monitors, check frequency, subscribers or status pages.
- FreemiumA free tier with a few monitors at a slower interval and your branding on the status page.
- UsageSMS or phone alerts billed per message above an allowance.
02Payments it reads
- StripePlans and per-message charges through Stripe; renewals, upgrades and refunds are read.
- Lemon SqueezyIndie uptime tools sell plans through Lemon Squeezy, linked through checkout custom data.
- PolarDeveloper-run monitoring tools bill through Polar; orders, subscription cycles and lost disputes are read.
What Tally can't read
- Traffic to the status pages you host for customers isn't yours: during their incidents it can dwarf your marketing site, so those pages should carry no tag.
- Uptime checks, incidents and alert deliveries inside the product aren't read.
- Fees your SMS provider charges you aren't read; only what customers pay you is.
03Where buyers come from
- Outage newsAfter a large cloud or SaaS outage, searches and threads about status pages and monitoring bring teams resolving not to be caught out again.
- Hacker NewsShow HN posts and post-mortem threads send engineers who compare tools on the spot.
- Status page footersThe 'powered by' link on customers' status pages reaches people reading during an incident; a UTM on it counts them.
- Developer searchSearches for how to monitor an endpoint, set up a heartbeat check or add a status page bring engineers mid-task.
- AI assistantsEngineers asking an assistant for an uptime monitor land in the AI channel.
04What Tally answers
Did last week's outage elsewhere bring buyers or only readers?
List the sales from those days and open their receipts: each shows the visits behind it and the credited source, so you count the buyers who came from outage threads rather than guessing from the traffic spike.
ReceiptsWho is on the site while an outage elsewhere is trending?
The live view shows visitors on the site now, on a globe or a flat map, with their source, so you can watch a surge from an outage thread arrive.
LiveDo engineers buy on the first visit?
Path to purchase gives the share who pay on the first visit and the median time to purchase; buyers fresh from an incident of their own tend to sit at the short end.
Path to purchaseWhen do engineers buy monitoring?
Peak hours on sales shows the weekdays and hours plans are bought; incidents happen at any hour, and purchases right after one can land outside working time.
Peak hoursDo visitors from the link on status pages pay?
With UTMs, those visitors are a campaign with their own row of visitors and revenue, separate from your search and community traffic.
Sources with revenue
05Numbers worth watching
- First-visit buyers
- The share who pay on their first visit, which an incident of their own pushes up.
- Revenue per visitor
- Revenue per visitor by source, which keeps an outage thread's crowd in proportion.
- Visitors from AI assistants
- Visits from AI assistants asked to recommend a monitor or a status page.
- Renewals
- Renewals by first source; teams who bought in a panic may not renew, and this is where it shows.
06An example
Busiest on Mondays, 14:00–17:00
2.1× the visits of an average three hours. Post around Mon 13:00 to be there as they arrive.
Shades are each hour's average over the times this period holds it, so a weekday that comes round five times doesn't outshine one that comes round four. The totals beside and below are the period's actual sums, not averages.
07Setting up
- Any HTML siteAdd the tag to the marketing site and docs, and leave it off the status pages you host.
- StripePass tally_visitor_id in Checkout Session metadata and subscription_data, so per-message charges and renewals follow the first payment.
- PolarWith Polar, set the visitor's id in the checkout's metadata when a team picks a plan.
- Tag the 'powered by' link on hosted status pages with UTMs.
08Questions
A customer's incident sends thousands of readers to their status page. Does that hit our numbers?
Only if the page carries the tag. Without it, readers count only if they click through to your own site, where the link's UTM marks them.
Are SMS alert charges counted as revenue?
When they're billed through your connected provider, yes, as part of the invoice, without tax.
Can we check sales from the command line?
Yes. The command line and the REST API return the figures, and the MCP server lets an AI assistant answer questions about them in the middle of an on-call shift.