# ClearMyInbox's minutes-not-weeks incident detection with Better Stack

**Company:** ClearMyInbox

*[ClearMyInbox](https://clearmyinbox.ai) scans a Gmail or Outlook inbox, lists every subscription sender, unsubscribes in bulk — then verifies which senders actually stopped emailing. It's a bootstrapped, solo-founded UK SaaS running an ASP.NET Core API on Azure Container Apps, with a React + TypeScript frontend, scheduled container jobs, and serverless SQL Server.*

**Industry:** Productivity software / Email management

**Use cases:** Uptime monitoring, public status page, incident alerting

**Savings:** ~£100 in wasted database spend from a single undetected outage, plus hours per week of manual dashboard-checking reclaimed

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### When "built-in cloud alerting" isn't monitoring

As a solo founder, Chris Devine was the entire engineering and ops team. External monitoring never made it to the top of the list. Azure Monitor was available, but never set up. No uptime checks, no paging, nothing watching production from the outside. That gap stayed invisible until it very much wasn't.

> *"Azure Monitor was sitting right there and I had never wired it up properly — no uptime checks, no paging, nothing external. Which is exactly how the story below happened."*
> 

> — Chris Devine, Founder, ClearMyInbox

### Starting strong with Better Stack

Once the decision became urgent, Chris looked at what other indie SaaS products actually use — and Better Stack kept surfacing, mostly via the "Powered by Better Stack" status pages visible under many bootstrapped products. There was no bake-off: he needed monitoring that day.

Setup took under an hour, all-in: three uptime monitors — the site, the API, and a second health check on the API's scheduler endpoint that drives the weekly scans — followed by a public status page on a custom domain: [status.clearmyinbox.ai](https://status.clearmyinbox.ai). 

> *"The status page was live before I had finished my coffee, which is not something I can say about anything else in the Azure side of my stack."*

![clearmyinbox-monitors-framed-2x.png](https://imagedelivery.net/xZXo0QFi-1_4Zimer-T0XQ/55dda506-a34d-48db-18fa-8b8edf50d500/lg1x =3576x1756)

### The only ops report worth reading

With monitors and the status page as the core of the setup, the weekly summary email has quietly become ClearMyInbox's entire ops reporting. Production has been calm since the switch, and that calm now carries information it never did before, because silence from a monitor means something silence from an unmonitored system never can.

> *"The weekly 'no downtime this week' email is my favourite kind of boring. What it actually changed is deploy confidence: I ship knowing that if the API stops answering, I find out before my customers do."*

![clearmyinbox-statuspage-framed-2x.png](https://imagedelivery.net/xZXo0QFi-1_4Zimer-T0XQ/f3577ac3-e70b-4097-1930-37099f310600/md2x =3576x1756)

### The outage that only the invoice noticed

Back in June — before any monitoring existed — the ClearMyInbox API went down and stayed down for about two weeks. The container crash-looped the whole time: health probes failed, the app restarted, then failed again. With no external monitoring, no alert ever fired.

So how did Chris find out? The bill.

Every crash-loop restart woke the serverless SQL database, so it never auto-paused. That month's database bill roughly doubled — about £100 of pure waste. An Azure invoice was the first and only alert for a two-week outage. 

### Key takeaways: what changed for ClearMyInbox

By switching from unconfigured cloud alerting to Better Stack, ClearMyInbox now has:

- External uptime monitoring across the site, the API, and the API's scheduler endpoint — independent of the cloud provider that never alerted
- A branded public status page at status.clearmyinbox.ai, live with a custom domain in under an hour
- Detection in minutes, not weeks, with alerts delivered to the inbox an email founder never misses
- An ops function without an ops hire – hours a week of dashboard-checking redirected into building the product, and no repeat of the £100 burned by one silent outage

> *"There is no ops team here – Better Stack is effectively it. What I'd tell other solo founders: set up external monitoring before your first user, right after you buy the domain. Your cloud's built-in alerting is configured by you — and you are exactly the person who forgets to configure it."*
> 

> — Chris Devine, Founder, ClearMyInbox