> If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product.

Your status page is not your product (hopefully). If you run an online service, the purpose of a status page is to inform your customers of downtime and other issues that may affect their use of your service.

Like I said, I am not questioning whether statuspage.io has built a better status page than what most companies would be motivated to build themselves. What I am pointing out is that spending $xx or $xxx each month on a SaaS for every little piece of functionality you don't want to build internally adds up.

As for the costs of building internally, I would suggest that a half-decent engineer could build a satisfactory status page with email/SMS notification functionality in 2-3 days. If you want to be generous and say it would take a week, and your engineer is paid $110,000/year (~$2300/week), you're still ahead of statuspage.io's $249/month plan, which costs $3,000/year and limits you to just 2,500 subscribers.

If you operate, say, an API that is critical to your business and keeping consumers of that API informed about status is important, there's no reason not to invest engineering time in owning the status page functionality. On the flip side, if your status page isn't all that important, paying $xx or $xxx/month for a robust status page service instead of, say, rolling a status page of your own using [insert popular open-source CMS of your choice] doesn't make a lot of sense.