Free-tier watching for Supabase & Render
Watchpost watches your free Supabase and Render projects and says, in plain words, what state each one is in — and what put it there. A slow wake-up is not an outage, and we never call it one.
Two services on the free tier. No card, nothing to cancel.
Built for the small things people put their name on
Free tiers are generous and they are strange. Four things go wrong, and none of them are the thing your monitor is looking for.
A recruiter opened my portfolio and it just spun. I was sure it had crashed — it was only asleep.
My uptime tool emails me most mornings. It shouts outage when the thing is simply waking up.
Something ate my 750 free hours by the 22nd and every web service stopped until the 1st.
Supabase paused my project after a week away. I found out from a friend.
The whole idea
Both of these days contain a stretch where your link did not answer. One is Render doing exactly what the free tier says it does. The other is a service that fell over.
Fifteen idle minutes, so Render stopped the instance. One visitor waited while it started. Nothing broke.
Every request refused for 29 to 39 minutes — a range, because we only know the gap between two checks.
Every other uptime tool writes both of these rows into the same red downtime number. Watchpost keeps them apart — WAKING is its own state — so that DOWN still means something on the day you finally see it.
Three steps. No agent to install, no repository access, no card.
The address of your Render service or your Supabase project. That is the entire setup — we never ask for a token or a repo.
https://portfolio-web.onrender.comEvery 5, 15 or 60 minutes. You pick, because our checks are traffic too, and traffic is instance-time.
Not a red dot. A sentence: which of the seven states it is in, and what we think put it there.
Woke after 47 s. Idle since 03:12.Sleep, told honestly
A free Render service sleeps after fifteen idle minutes and takes about a minute to answer the first request after that. Watchpost draws those days in amber hatch and marks them WAKING, beside the days it answered at once — so you can finally tell the two apart.
How WAKING is decidedLog scale 0.1–60 s
A projection built from our own checks. Render publishes no meter we can read, so treat it as a warning line, not a bill.
The quota nobody reads
Render gives your whole workspace 750 free instance-hours a month, shared across every free web service in it. Keeping one awake around the clock spends nearly all of them. Run the workspace dry and every free web service in it stops until the 1st.
Our checks are traffic too, so they are counted on the left. We will never show a countdown we are quietly resetting.
How we project hoursThe seventh state
Some things simply cannot be seen from outside. When that happens Watchpost shows UNKNOWN and tells you why it is stuck, instead of guessing and showing you a green tick you would have believed.
A wrong reassurance is worse than no reading at all.
Read all seven statesSupabase · free project
The database refused our connection. A Supabase project paused for inactivity and one whose database is genuinely broken look identical from out here — both close the socket the same way. We cannot tell which this is, and we will not pretend.
Thirty seconds there settles it.
Small, unglamorous features that exist because a beginner asked for them at the wrong hour of the night.
Email or Telegram, written the way a person would say it: what changed, when, and whether it needs you tonight.
Five, fifteen or sixty minutes — with the instance-hour cost of each one shown before you pick it.
Thirty days of state changes, each with the reason we recorded at the time — and a mark wherever we were not watching.
If your project genuinely needs to be awake, we say so and point at Render's paid instance. We do not sell it.
The free tier is the product. The two tiers beside it are a plan, not a purchase — there is nothing to buy on this site today.
For one portfolio and one project you care about.
For the person with a few things live at once.
Planned, not yet available. Nothing here can be bought today and no payment details are collected anywhere on this site.
For two or three people minding the same free tier.
Planned, not yet available. Nothing here can be bought today and no payment details are collected anywhere on this site.
No card fields anywhere on this site. The free tier does not become a trial and does not expire.