The monitoring tax on bootstrapped companies
Enterprise monitoring tools (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace) are priced for teams. At $20-50/user/month, a solo founder pays more for monitoring than for their hosting. There's a better way.
Pre-revenue: the essentials (free)
You need: error capture with stack traces, one alert channel (email is fine), basic performance metrics. ProdFix free tier covers this for up to 3 projects. No credit card, no expiry.
$1k MRR stage: add user context
At this stage, you need to know which users are hitting errors — so you can reach out proactively. Add user session context to your error monitoring. ProdFix starter tier ($13/mo launch price).
$5k MRR stage: add performance monitoring
As your user base grows, performance issues start affecting conversion. Add Core Web Vitals tracking and set up alerts when LCP or CLS regresses.
What's genuinely overkill at sub-$10k MRR
Distributed tracing, custom metrics pipelines, multi-region synthetic monitoring, dedicated status pages, on-call management software. You don't need these yet.
The bootstrapper's monitoring principle
Spend the minimum to get maximum visibility into user-facing errors. Everything else is nice-to-have. ProdFix is designed with this principle in mind.
Stop flying blind in production.
ProdFix gives you error monitoring, performance tracking, security alerts, and AI-powered fixes — built for solo founders and vibe coders. One SDK, 2-minute setup.