Recently I pushed a long overdue feature for Checkly: SSL for customers' public dashboards. This was kinda, sort of, totally missing when I launched and many customers asked for it. Setting up free SSL turned out to be fairly smooth because of Most principles explained here are totally transferable to whatever stack you are using. There are some pretty important gotcha's though, so let's dive in. Customers of Checkly can create public dashboards and host them on a custom domain.

Something different this week. I got an email from an aspiring SaaS bootstrapper. Let's call him John. John explained his working situation at a tech startup and his dream to start a SaaS in the cloud security space by himself. He also had some pretty good questions. I asked John if it was OK if I answered them in the form of a blog post. He agreed, so here we are.

Last Friday May 31, Nicolas Beauvais, CTO and only tech person of small startup raisup.com, took to Twitter with a cry for help. Their cloud hosting company Digital Ocean had just locked their account and made it clear that this was permanent.

Last week I rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms. However, that patch was just the last step of a longer journey. This post details those steps and all the stuff I learned along the way. We'll look at how I analyzed performance issues, tested fixes and how simple Postgres optimizations can have spectacular results.

There is a lot of dogma around shipping a product in startup land. Many founders follow strict patterns they got from a book or some influencer's tweet. "Ship Early" is one of the more stubborn ones, and in many cases it is exactly the right thing to do. The earlier you start learning about what your users' problems and how your product solves that, the better. I shipped Checkly fairly late.

Hello, Checkly community and Monitoring as Code (MaC) aficionados! We have some exhilarating news that we can't wait to share. Our mascot is sporting sunglasses today because Checkly has been named in Gartner®'s 2023 Cool Vendors in Monitoring and Observability: Where Awareness Meets Understanding report!

During the spring and summer of 2018 I was negotiating a possible acquihire of Checkly / moi with Datadog. I'm only writing about it right now because Datadog recently launched their Synthetics product — the product I would be involved with as some form of product manager. This post details how this all came to be, what steps we took in the process and some reflections on the whole thing.

Over the last year or so, I experimented with different ways of getting customer feedback for Checkly. This post is about what worked for us and how I was totally wrong about chat widgets.

Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation.

This is a short follow up to last week's story on Stripe Billing as a reader on Hackernews commented that it seemed we didn't handle VAT. We do, but I just left it out of the story. For those not familiar with handling EU VAT for SaaS companies: It's a bit of counter intuitive jungle. At least that's what some dedicated SaaS startups make you believe. Also, Stripe does not handle it at all. They give you a { taxRate: null } field for you to fill.