Vibecode Instatus
track this build5 steps, step by step0%KINDA · weekend project
The page itself is the easy part: components, colored dots, an incident timeline, a 90 day uptime bar; an agent will hand you that in an afternoon. The notification fan-out is where it gets annoying: email is a Resend account and a loop, but you inherit double opt-in, unsubscribes, bounce handling, and explaining why the incident email landed in spam during the outage. Hosting is the other half: a status page on the same infra as the thing it reports on is decoration, so you need a separate host and domain and the discipline to keep it boring. Add the workflow Instatus quietly gives you, writing an update from your phone at 2am, per-component subscriber preferences, Slack and RSS and webhooks. Buildable in a weekend for a personal project; not the thing to hand-roll if a real customer contract mentions the words 'status page'.
the project pack4 files · fastest path to a working personal build
You are building a lean indie version of Instatus.
Create the following project files first, then implement the application by following them. Keep the files updated as decisions change. Do not collapse this into a single README or prompt.
===== README.md =====
# Instatus indie build
## Goal
Build the smallest trustworthy replacement for the core Instatus workflow for one developer or a tiny team.
## Scope
A separately hosted status page that renders component health and incident updates from a small database, with an admin form to post updates and an email blast to confirmed subscribers.
## Quick start
1. Install the documented dependencies.
2. Copy `.env.example` to `.env`.
3. Run the development command chosen during implementation.
4. Complete the acceptance checks in `BUILD_PLAN.md`.
## Honest limits
This build deliberately does not replace:
- Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test
- Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box
- Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about
- The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API
- Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack
If those capabilities are essential, use Instatus instead of pretending the gap is solved.
===== AGENTS.md =====
# Agent instructions
- Optimize for a working, understandable weekend build.
- Prefer the fewest moving parts that satisfy the brief.
- Do not invent cryptography, security guarantees, APIs, or compliance claims.
- Keep secrets out of source control and logs.
- Add focused tests for destructive, security-sensitive, and data-loss paths.
- Run the project checks before declaring the build complete.
- Record any deliberate shortcut in the README under "Tradeoffs".
===== BUILD_PLAN.md =====
# Build plan
## Original build brief
Build a self-hosted status page app in an empty folder. Stack, no substitutions: Node 20, Fastify, better-sqlite3, server-rendered HTML via Fastify's reply.type('text/html') and plain template literal functions, vanilla CSS in one file. No React, no build step, no ORM.
What it does:
1. Public page at / showing a list of components (name, description, status: operational, degraded, partial_outage, major_outage) with an overall banner computed from the worst component status.
2. Under that, incidents newest first. An incident has a title, impact, current status (investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved), and an append-only list of timestamped updates.
3. A 90 day uptime strip per component rendered from a daily_status table (one row per component per day, worst status seen that day). Fill it from the poller below.
4. GET /api/status returning the same data as JSON, and GET /feed.rss as a valid RSS 2.0 feed of incident updates.
5. Admin at /admin behind a single bearer token from ADMIN_TOKEN in .env, checked with a constant-time compare. Forms to: set component status, open an incident, append an update, resolve it. HTML forms, no JS framework.
6. Subscribers: POST /subscribe takes an email, stores it unconfirmed with a random token, emails a confirm link. GET /confirm/:token confirms. Every email includes a working GET /unsubscribe/:token link. When an admin appends an incident update, queue one email per confirmed subscriber and send them sequentially with a small delay, logging failures to a sends table. Use Resend via fetch with RESEND_API_KEY from .env; if the key is absent, write the emails to ./outbox/ as .txt files instead so it runs offline.
7. Optional poller: a setInterval that HTTP GETs each component's check_url if set, marks degraded on slow responses over 2s and major_outage on non-2xx or timeout, and writes daily_status.
In scope: SQLite schema created on boot with migrations as plain SQL strings, seed script with three components and one resolved incident, a README that says in one sentence to deploy this somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors.
Out of scope, do not build: multi-tenancy, SMS, Slack or Discord integrations, OAuth, custom domain automation, an analytics or telemetry call of any kind, Docker, a JS bundler.
Secrets only in .env, with a .env.example committed and .env gitignored. Include npm scripts: dev, seed, poll. It must run with npm install and npm run dev on a clean machine.
## Required capabilities
- A host that is not the infrastructure you are reporting on, ideally a different provider entirely
- A separate domain or subdomain on separate DNS
- A transactional email provider with a verified sending domain, e.g. Resend or Postmark
- Somewhere to store subscribers that survives a reboot
## Delivery order
1. Scaffold the smallest runnable application and document its commands.
2. Implement the primary data model and core workflow.
3. Add validation, safe failure states, and persistence.
4. Cover the critical path with automated tests.
5. Exercise a clean install from the README and fix every missing step.
## Done when
- A new user can go from clone to first successful workflow using only the README.
- The core workflow works without paid infrastructure unless the brief requires it.
- Tests cover the highest-risk behavior.
- Known limitations are explicit rather than hidden.
===== .env.example =====
# Copy to .env and document every variable when it is introduced.
# Never put real credentials in this file.
APP_ENV=development
# Add only values required by the selected implementation.You are building a lean indie version of Instatus.
Create the following project files first, then implement the application by following them. Keep the files updated as decisions change. Do not collapse this into a single README or prompt.
===== README.md =====
# Instatus indie build
## Goal
Build the smallest trustworthy replacement for the core Instatus workflow for one developer or a tiny team.
## Scope
A separately hosted status page that renders component health and incident updates from a small database, with an admin form to post updates and an email blast to confirmed subscribers.
## Quick start
1. Install the documented dependencies.
2. Copy `.env.example` to `.env`.
3. Run the development command chosen during implementation.
4. Complete the acceptance checks in `BUILD_PLAN.md`.
## Honest limits
This build deliberately does not replace:
- Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test
- Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box
- Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about
- The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API
- Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack
If those capabilities are essential, use Instatus instead of pretending the gap is solved.
===== AGENTS.md =====
# Agent instructions
- Optimize for a working, understandable weekend build.
- Prefer the fewest moving parts that satisfy the brief.
- Do not invent cryptography, security guarantees, APIs, or compliance claims.
- Keep secrets out of source control and logs.
- Add focused tests for destructive, security-sensitive, and data-loss paths.
- Run the project checks before declaring the build complete.
- Record any deliberate shortcut in the README under "Tradeoffs".
===== BUILD_PLAN.md =====
# Build plan
## Original build brief
Build a self-hosted status page app in an empty folder. Stack, no substitutions: Node 20, Fastify, better-sqlite3, server-rendered HTML via Fastify's reply.type('text/html') and plain template literal functions, vanilla CSS in one file. No React, no build step, no ORM.
What it does:
1. Public page at / showing a list of components (name, description, status: operational, degraded, partial_outage, major_outage) with an overall banner computed from the worst component status.
2. Under that, incidents newest first. An incident has a title, impact, current status (investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved), and an append-only list of timestamped updates.
3. A 90 day uptime strip per component rendered from a daily_status table (one row per component per day, worst status seen that day). Fill it from the poller below.
4. GET /api/status returning the same data as JSON, and GET /feed.rss as a valid RSS 2.0 feed of incident updates.
5. Admin at /admin behind a single bearer token from ADMIN_TOKEN in .env, checked with a constant-time compare. Forms to: set component status, open an incident, append an update, resolve it. HTML forms, no JS framework.
6. Subscribers: POST /subscribe takes an email, stores it unconfirmed with a random token, emails a confirm link. GET /confirm/:token confirms. Every email includes a working GET /unsubscribe/:token link. When an admin appends an incident update, queue one email per confirmed subscriber and send them sequentially with a small delay, logging failures to a sends table. Use Resend via fetch with RESEND_API_KEY from .env; if the key is absent, write the emails to ./outbox/ as .txt files instead so it runs offline.
7. Optional poller: a setInterval that HTTP GETs each component's check_url if set, marks degraded on slow responses over 2s and major_outage on non-2xx or timeout, and writes daily_status.
In scope: SQLite schema created on boot with migrations as plain SQL strings, seed script with three components and one resolved incident, a README that says in one sentence to deploy this somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors.
Out of scope, do not build: multi-tenancy, SMS, Slack or Discord integrations, OAuth, custom domain automation, an analytics or telemetry call of any kind, Docker, a JS bundler.
Secrets only in .env, with a .env.example committed and .env gitignored. Include npm scripts: dev, seed, poll. It must run with npm install and npm run dev on a clean machine.
## Required capabilities
- A host that is not the infrastructure you are reporting on, ideally a different provider entirely
- A separate domain or subdomain on separate DNS
- A transactional email provider with a verified sending domain, e.g. Resend or Postmark
- Somewhere to store subscribers that survives a reboot
## Delivery order
1. Scaffold the smallest runnable application and document its commands.
2. Implement the primary data model and core workflow.
3. Add validation, safe failure states, and persistence.
4. Cover the critical path with automated tests.
5. Exercise a clean install from the README and fix every missing step.
## Done when
- A new user can go from clone to first successful workflow using only the README.
- The core workflow works without paid infrastructure unless the brief requires it.
- Tests cover the highest-risk behavior.
- Known limitations are explicit rather than hidden.
===== .env.example =====
# Copy to .env and document every variable when it is introduced.
# Never put real credentials in this file.
APP_ENV=development
# Add only values required by the selected implementation.You are building a production product version of Instatus.
Create the following project files first, then implement the application by following them. Keep the files updated as decisions change. Do not collapse this into a single README or prompt.
===== PRODUCT.md =====
# Instatus product brief
## Problem
The page itself is the easy part: components, colored dots, an incident timeline, a 90 day uptime bar; an agent will hand you that in an afternoon. The notification fan-out is where it gets annoying: email is a Resend account and a loop, but you inherit double opt-in, unsubscribes, bounce handling, and explaining why the incident email landed in spam during the outage. Hosting is the other half: a status page on the same infra as the thing it reports on is decoration, so you need a separate host and domain and the discipline to keep it boring. Add the workflow Instatus quietly gives you, writing an update from your phone at 2am, per-component subscriber preferences, Slack and RSS and webhooks. Buildable in a weekend for a personal project; not the thing to hand-roll if a real customer contract mentions the words 'status page'.
## Product outcome
A separately hosted status page that renders component health and incident updates from a small database, with an admin form to post updates and an email blast to confirmed subscribers.
## Target user
A serious builder who needs a maintainable product foundation rather than a one-off demo.
## Required capabilities
- A host that is not the infrastructure you are reporting on, ideally a different provider entirely
- A separate domain or subdomain on separate DNS
- A transactional email provider with a verified sending domain, e.g. Resend or Postmark
- Somewhere to store subscribers that survives a reboot
## Explicit non-goals for v1
- Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test
- Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box
- Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about
- The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API
- Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack
## Success criteria
- The primary workflow is measurable end to end.
- Setup is reproducible in a clean environment.
- Failure, recovery, and support paths are documented.
- Product claims match what the implementation actually guarantees.
===== ARCHITECTURE.md =====
# Architecture
## Starting brief
Build a self-hosted status page app in an empty folder. Stack, no substitutions: Node 20, Fastify, better-sqlite3, server-rendered HTML via Fastify's reply.type('text/html') and plain template literal functions, vanilla CSS in one file. No React, no build step, no ORM.
What it does:
1. Public page at / showing a list of components (name, description, status: operational, degraded, partial_outage, major_outage) with an overall banner computed from the worst component status.
2. Under that, incidents newest first. An incident has a title, impact, current status (investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved), and an append-only list of timestamped updates.
3. A 90 day uptime strip per component rendered from a daily_status table (one row per component per day, worst status seen that day). Fill it from the poller below.
4. GET /api/status returning the same data as JSON, and GET /feed.rss as a valid RSS 2.0 feed of incident updates.
5. Admin at /admin behind a single bearer token from ADMIN_TOKEN in .env, checked with a constant-time compare. Forms to: set component status, open an incident, append an update, resolve it. HTML forms, no JS framework.
6. Subscribers: POST /subscribe takes an email, stores it unconfirmed with a random token, emails a confirm link. GET /confirm/:token confirms. Every email includes a working GET /unsubscribe/:token link. When an admin appends an incident update, queue one email per confirmed subscriber and send them sequentially with a small delay, logging failures to a sends table. Use Resend via fetch with RESEND_API_KEY from .env; if the key is absent, write the emails to ./outbox/ as .txt files instead so it runs offline.
7. Optional poller: a setInterval that HTTP GETs each component's check_url if set, marks degraded on slow responses over 2s and major_outage on non-2xx or timeout, and writes daily_status.
In scope: SQLite schema created on boot with migrations as plain SQL strings, seed script with three components and one resolved incident, a README that says in one sentence to deploy this somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors.
Out of scope, do not build: multi-tenancy, SMS, Slack or Discord integrations, OAuth, custom domain automation, an analytics or telemetry call of any kind, Docker, a JS bundler.
Secrets only in .env, with a .env.example committed and .env gitignored. Include npm scripts: dev, seed, poll. It must run with npm install and npm run dev on a clean machine.
## Boundaries
Separate the product into replaceable modules for interface, application logic, persistence, external integrations, and operational concerns. Keep domain logic independent from delivery frameworks and vendors.
## Production baseline
- Configuration: validated at startup with safe local defaults where possible.
- Security: least privilege, input validation, secret redaction, rate limits on abuse-prone paths, and no invented security primitives.
- Data: explicit schema and migrations, transactional writes where integrity matters, backup and restore instructions.
- Integrations: adapters around third-party providers, idempotent webhook or job processing, bounded retries, and timeouts.
- Observability: structured logs with request or operation IDs, an error-tracking hook, and health/readiness checks where a server exists.
- Quality: unit tests for domain rules, integration tests at module boundaries, and one end-to-end critical-path test.
## Decision records
For each major dependency, document why it was chosen, its failure mode, and how it can be replaced. Do not introduce infrastructure until a requirement justifies it.
===== AGENTS.md =====
# Agent instructions
- Read `PRODUCT.md` and `ARCHITECTURE.md` before changing code.
- Implement milestone by milestone; keep each change reviewable and leave the application runnable.
- Treat authentication, payments, encryption, imports, webhooks, and destructive actions as high-risk boundaries when present.
- Never invent cryptography or silently weaken a requirement to make a test pass.
- Use provider interfaces for external services and deterministic fakes in tests.
- Add migrations and rollback or recovery notes for persistent data changes.
- Log useful operational context without credentials, tokens, passwords, or personal data.
- Update documentation and run all checks before completing a milestone.
===== MILESTONES.md =====
# Delivery milestones
## M0 — Decisions and scaffold
- Confirm the runtime, persistence model, threat boundaries, and deployment target.
- Create a reproducible local environment and continuous checks.
## M1 — Core workflow
- Implement the smallest end-to-end product path with validation and tests.
- Keep integrations behind interfaces.
## M2 — Trust layer
- Add secure failure behavior, recovery paths, audit-relevant events, and data safeguards.
- Test abuse cases and destructive operations.
## M3 — Operability
- Add structured logs, error reporting hooks, health signals, backup/restore documentation, and deployment configuration.
## M4 — Release gate
- Run a clean-install test, critical-path end-to-end test, dependency review, and documented rollback exercise.
- Compare the shipped behavior with `PRODUCT.md` and publish remaining limitations.
===== OPERATIONS.md =====
# Operations
## Before release
- Validate configuration and secrets at startup.
- Define backup, restore, and rollback procedures and test them.
- Document logs, error tracking, health signals, and alert ownership.
- Set dependency update and vulnerability review expectations.
## Incident checklist
1. Contain the issue without destroying evidence or user data.
2. Record the timeline and affected scope.
3. Rotate exposed secrets and revoke compromised sessions or credentials.
4. Restore from a verified source when needed.
5. Document the root cause, remediation, and regression test.
## Launch constraint
Do not market omitted Instatus capabilities as implemented. The v1 non-goals in `PRODUCT.md` remain user-visible limitations until they are deliberately delivered.README.md
# Instatus indie build ## Goal Build the smallest trustworthy replacement for the core Instatus workflow for one developer or a tiny team. ## Scope A separately hosted status page that renders component health and incident updates from a small database, with an admin form to post updates and an email blast to confirmed subscribers. ## Quick start 1. Install the documented dependencies. 2. Copy `.env.example` to `.env`. 3. Run the development command chosen during implementation. 4. Complete the acceptance checks in `BUILD_PLAN.md`. ## Honest limits This build deliberately does not replace: - Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test - Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box - Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about - The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API - Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack If those capabilities are essential, use Instatus instead of pretending the gap is solved.
AGENTS.md
# Agent instructions - Optimize for a working, understandable weekend build. - Prefer the fewest moving parts that satisfy the brief. - Do not invent cryptography, security guarantees, APIs, or compliance claims. - Keep secrets out of source control and logs. - Add focused tests for destructive, security-sensitive, and data-loss paths. - Run the project checks before declaring the build complete. - Record any deliberate shortcut in the README under "Tradeoffs".
BUILD_PLAN.md
# Build plan
## Original build brief
Build a self-hosted status page app in an empty folder. Stack, no substitutions: Node 20, Fastify, better-sqlite3, server-rendered HTML via Fastify's reply.type('text/html') and plain template literal functions, vanilla CSS in one file. No React, no build step, no ORM.
What it does:
1. Public page at / showing a list of components (name, description, status: operational, degraded, partial_outage, major_outage) with an overall banner computed from the worst component status.
2. Under that, incidents newest first. An incident has a title, impact, current status (investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved), and an append-only list of timestamped updates.
3. A 90 day uptime strip per component rendered from a daily_status table (one row per component per day, worst status seen that day). Fill it from the poller below.
4. GET /api/status returning the same data as JSON, and GET /feed.rss as a valid RSS 2.0 feed of incident updates.
5. Admin at /admin behind a single bearer token from ADMIN_TOKEN in .env, checked with a constant-time compare. Forms to: set component status, open an incident, append an update, resolve it. HTML forms, no JS framework.
6. Subscribers: POST /subscribe takes an email, stores it unconfirmed with a random token, emails a confirm link. GET /confirm/:token confirms. Every email includes a working GET /unsubscribe/:token link. When an admin appends an incident update, queue one email per confirmed subscriber and send them sequentially with a small delay, logging failures to a sends table. Use Resend via fetch with RESEND_API_KEY from .env; if the key is absent, write the emails to ./outbox/ as .txt files instead so it runs offline.
7. Optional poller: a setInterval that HTTP GETs each component's check_url if set, marks degraded on slow responses over 2s and major_outage on non-2xx or timeout, and writes daily_status.
In scope: SQLite schema created on boot with migrations as plain SQL strings, seed script with three components and one resolved incident, a README that says in one sentence to deploy this somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors.
Out of scope, do not build: multi-tenancy, SMS, Slack or Discord integrations, OAuth, custom domain automation, an analytics or telemetry call of any kind, Docker, a JS bundler.
Secrets only in .env, with a .env.example committed and .env gitignored. Include npm scripts: dev, seed, poll. It must run with npm install and npm run dev on a clean machine.
## Required capabilities
- A host that is not the infrastructure you are reporting on, ideally a different provider entirely
- A separate domain or subdomain on separate DNS
- A transactional email provider with a verified sending domain, e.g. Resend or Postmark
- Somewhere to store subscribers that survives a reboot
## Delivery order
1. Scaffold the smallest runnable application and document its commands.
2. Implement the primary data model and core workflow.
3. Add validation, safe failure states, and persistence.
4. Cover the critical path with automated tests.
5. Exercise a clean install from the README and fix every missing step.
## Done when
- A new user can go from clone to first successful workflow using only the README.
- The core workflow works without paid infrastructure unless the brief requires it.
- Tests cover the highest-risk behavior.
- Known limitations are explicit rather than hidden..env.example
# Copy to .env and document every variable when it is introduced. # Never put real credentials in this file. APP_ENV=development # Add only values required by the selected implementation.
PRODUCT.md
# Instatus product brief ## Problem The page itself is the easy part: components, colored dots, an incident timeline, a 90 day uptime bar; an agent will hand you that in an afternoon. The notification fan-out is where it gets annoying: email is a Resend account and a loop, but you inherit double opt-in, unsubscribes, bounce handling, and explaining why the incident email landed in spam during the outage. Hosting is the other half: a status page on the same infra as the thing it reports on is decoration, so you need a separate host and domain and the discipline to keep it boring. Add the workflow Instatus quietly gives you, writing an update from your phone at 2am, per-component subscriber preferences, Slack and RSS and webhooks. Buildable in a weekend for a personal project; not the thing to hand-roll if a real customer contract mentions the words 'status page'. ## Product outcome A separately hosted status page that renders component health and incident updates from a small database, with an admin form to post updates and an email blast to confirmed subscribers. ## Target user A serious builder who needs a maintainable product foundation rather than a one-off demo. ## Required capabilities - A host that is not the infrastructure you are reporting on, ideally a different provider entirely - A separate domain or subdomain on separate DNS - A transactional email provider with a verified sending domain, e.g. Resend or Postmark - Somewhere to store subscribers that survives a reboot ## Explicit non-goals for v1 - Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test - Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box - Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about - The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API - Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack ## Success criteria - The primary workflow is measurable end to end. - Setup is reproducible in a clean environment. - Failure, recovery, and support paths are documented. - Product claims match what the implementation actually guarantees.
ARCHITECTURE.md
# Architecture
## Starting brief
Build a self-hosted status page app in an empty folder. Stack, no substitutions: Node 20, Fastify, better-sqlite3, server-rendered HTML via Fastify's reply.type('text/html') and plain template literal functions, vanilla CSS in one file. No React, no build step, no ORM.
What it does:
1. Public page at / showing a list of components (name, description, status: operational, degraded, partial_outage, major_outage) with an overall banner computed from the worst component status.
2. Under that, incidents newest first. An incident has a title, impact, current status (investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved), and an append-only list of timestamped updates.
3. A 90 day uptime strip per component rendered from a daily_status table (one row per component per day, worst status seen that day). Fill it from the poller below.
4. GET /api/status returning the same data as JSON, and GET /feed.rss as a valid RSS 2.0 feed of incident updates.
5. Admin at /admin behind a single bearer token from ADMIN_TOKEN in .env, checked with a constant-time compare. Forms to: set component status, open an incident, append an update, resolve it. HTML forms, no JS framework.
6. Subscribers: POST /subscribe takes an email, stores it unconfirmed with a random token, emails a confirm link. GET /confirm/:token confirms. Every email includes a working GET /unsubscribe/:token link. When an admin appends an incident update, queue one email per confirmed subscriber and send them sequentially with a small delay, logging failures to a sends table. Use Resend via fetch with RESEND_API_KEY from .env; if the key is absent, write the emails to ./outbox/ as .txt files instead so it runs offline.
7. Optional poller: a setInterval that HTTP GETs each component's check_url if set, marks degraded on slow responses over 2s and major_outage on non-2xx or timeout, and writes daily_status.
In scope: SQLite schema created on boot with migrations as plain SQL strings, seed script with three components and one resolved incident, a README that says in one sentence to deploy this somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors.
Out of scope, do not build: multi-tenancy, SMS, Slack or Discord integrations, OAuth, custom domain automation, an analytics or telemetry call of any kind, Docker, a JS bundler.
Secrets only in .env, with a .env.example committed and .env gitignored. Include npm scripts: dev, seed, poll. It must run with npm install and npm run dev on a clean machine.
## Boundaries
Separate the product into replaceable modules for interface, application logic, persistence, external integrations, and operational concerns. Keep domain logic independent from delivery frameworks and vendors.
## Production baseline
- Configuration: validated at startup with safe local defaults where possible.
- Security: least privilege, input validation, secret redaction, rate limits on abuse-prone paths, and no invented security primitives.
- Data: explicit schema and migrations, transactional writes where integrity matters, backup and restore instructions.
- Integrations: adapters around third-party providers, idempotent webhook or job processing, bounded retries, and timeouts.
- Observability: structured logs with request or operation IDs, an error-tracking hook, and health/readiness checks where a server exists.
- Quality: unit tests for domain rules, integration tests at module boundaries, and one end-to-end critical-path test.
## Decision records
For each major dependency, document why it was chosen, its failure mode, and how it can be replaced. Do not introduce infrastructure until a requirement justifies it.AGENTS.md
# Agent instructions - Read `PRODUCT.md` and `ARCHITECTURE.md` before changing code. - Implement milestone by milestone; keep each change reviewable and leave the application runnable. - Treat authentication, payments, encryption, imports, webhooks, and destructive actions as high-risk boundaries when present. - Never invent cryptography or silently weaken a requirement to make a test pass. - Use provider interfaces for external services and deterministic fakes in tests. - Add migrations and rollback or recovery notes for persistent data changes. - Log useful operational context without credentials, tokens, passwords, or personal data. - Update documentation and run all checks before completing a milestone.
MILESTONES.md
# Delivery milestones ## M0 — Decisions and scaffold - Confirm the runtime, persistence model, threat boundaries, and deployment target. - Create a reproducible local environment and continuous checks. ## M1 — Core workflow - Implement the smallest end-to-end product path with validation and tests. - Keep integrations behind interfaces. ## M2 — Trust layer - Add secure failure behavior, recovery paths, audit-relevant events, and data safeguards. - Test abuse cases and destructive operations. ## M3 — Operability - Add structured logs, error reporting hooks, health signals, backup/restore documentation, and deployment configuration. ## M4 — Release gate - Run a clean-install test, critical-path end-to-end test, dependency review, and documented rollback exercise. - Compare the shipped behavior with `PRODUCT.md` and publish remaining limitations.
OPERATIONS.md
# Operations ## Before release - Validate configuration and secrets at startup. - Define backup, restore, and rollback procedures and test them. - Document logs, error tracking, health signals, and alert ownership. - Set dependency update and vulnerability review expectations. ## Incident checklist 1. Contain the issue without destroying evidence or user data. 2. Record the timeline and affected scope. 3. Rotate exposed secrets and revoke compromised sessions or credentials. 4. Restore from a verified source when needed. 5. Document the root cause, remediation, and regression test. ## Launch constraint Do not market omitted Instatus capabilities as implemented. The v1 non-goals in `PRODUCT.md` remain user-visible limitations until they are deliberately delivered.
$ choose a build depth, inspect the files, then open the complete pack in your agent · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR
Because a status page is the one page that must work when nothing else does, and paying a third party is the cheapest way to buy that independence. It is also a page customers and auditors look at, so it being slightly ugly or slightly late costs more trust than the subscription costs money. Most teams that build their own end up with a page that is technically theirs and practically unmaintained, with an incident feed whose last entry is from fourteen months ago.
xDeliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test
xNotification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box
xPer-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about
xThe polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API
xReal independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack
Nothing worth pointing at. That's why the prompt exists.
share on X ↗"I just replaced Instatus with one prompt"
Vibecode Instatus
Kinda. The core of Instatus is buildable in a weekend with the prompt on this page, but there are real gaps: Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test, Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box. Read the honest list above before committing.
How much does Instatus cost?
Instatus's pricing is usage-based or varies by plan · AI-drafted from a site submission; price unverified..
What do I lose by replacing Instatus?
Honestly: Deliverability someone else warms up and monitors: your first incident email is also your first send reputation test; Notification channels beyond email: SMS, Slack app, Teams, Discord, native webhooks, RSS, all of which Instatus ships out of the box; Per-component subscriptions, unsubscribe handling, and double opt-in that you do not have to think about; The polish: scheduled maintenance windows, incident templates, timezone handling, embeddable widgets, public API; Real independence, unless you actually do the work to host the page away from your own stack. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Instatus?
No mature open-source alternative worth pointing at, which is exactly why the one-shot prompt on this page exists.