Status Page Stinger

Public status page playbook: from platform selection through post-incident discipline. Backed by May 2026 research on pricing, API surfaces, and practitioner communication norms.

Command Brief: ai-tools/command-briefs/status-page-worker-bee-command-brief.md Research: research/research-summary.md

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When this stinger applies

Covers platform selection (Statuspage/Atlassian, Better Stack, Instatus, Cachet OSS), component tree architecture, incident communication templates (initial/update/resolution), subscriber notification setup (email, SMS, webhook, Slack), GDPR/CAN-SPAM compliance for notification lists, post-incident update discipline, and API-driven automation integration, for React/Next.js and SaaS products.

Load this stinger when status-page-worker-bee is invoked. Typical triggers:

• "Set up a status page for our SaaS product"
• "Which status page tool should we use, Statuspage vs Better Stack vs Instatus?"
• "We're on Statuspage; should we migrate to Better Stack?"
• "Write me an incident communication template"
• "Configure subscriber SMS notifications for our status page"
• "Our incident updates are confusing: audit them"
• "Write a maintenance window announcement"
• "Connect PagerDuty to our status page"
• "We're getting complaints about radio silence during incidents"
• "Cross-link this post-mortem to the status page incident"

Do NOT load for:

• Monitoring/alerting infrastructure configuration → devops-worker-bee
• On-call rotation design, PagerDuty/OpsGenie setup → devops-worker-bee
• Observability dashboards, SLO/SLI definitions → devops-worker-bee
• Operational runbooks → runbook-writing-worker-bee

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First action when this stinger is loaded

1. Read guides/00-platform-selection.md to understand the 2026 platform landscape: pricing has changed significantly since 2024.
2. Read guides/10-failure-modes.md first on every invocation. Covers the three most common status page anti-patterns that erode user trust.
3. Read the appropriate domain guide based on what the user needs.

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Critical directives

These non-negotiables apply on every invocation. Full justification in each guide.

• Separate the detection layer from the communication layer. Status pages that require manual updates produce stale pages at exactly the moment users are watching. Always surface the automation integration path. See guides/05-automation-integration.md.

• Never deliver an incident template without a time-box commitment. The "next update in X minutes" slot is not optional. It is the single highest-impact element in a template. See guides/02-incident-communication.md.

• Cachet v3 is NOT production-ready as of 2026. Subscriber/notification features are absent from v3.x. Recommend v2.4.1 for production. See guides/00-platform-selection.md for the full Cachet decision.

• Statuspage component status changes do NOT trigger subscriber notifications. Only incidents do. Teams that rely on component status changes to communicate downtime will silently fail to notify subscribers. Flag this in every Statuspage recommendation.

• Instatus SMS is BYOC (bring your own carrier). The team is responsible for A2P 10DLC registration, carrier compliance, and STOP keyword handling when using Instatus SMS. See guides/03-subscriber-notifications.md.

• Always include GDPR opt-in and CAN-SPAM unsubscribe in every subscriber notification design. These are legal requirements, not best-effort suggestions. See guides/03-subscriber-notifications.md.

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Folder layout

status-page-stinger/
+- SKILL.md                             (this file)
+- README.md                            (one-page human overview)
+- guides/
|  +- 00-platform-selection.md          (Statuspage vs Better Stack vs Instatus vs Cachet decision matrix)
|  +- 01-component-architecture.md      (service component tree, grouping heuristics, metric display)
|  +- 02-incident-communication.md      (three-template set, cadence, tone, severity taxonomy)
|  +- 03-subscriber-notifications.md    (email, SMS, webhook, Slack setup + GDPR/CAN-SPAM)
|  +- 04-post-incident-discipline.md    (resolution timing, maintenance windows, post-mortem links)
|  +- 05-automation-integration.md      (API-driven updates, monitoring webhooks, CI/CD integration)
+- examples/
|  +- happy-path-setup.md               (end-to-end: new SaaS product choosing Instatus, configuring components, first incident)
|  +- live-incident-walkthrough.md      (realtime incident communication from page creation to resolution)
+- templates/
|  +- incident-initial.md               (investigating/acknowledged template)
|  +- incident-update.md                (live update with time-box commitment)
|  +- incident-resolved.md              (resolution with post-mortem cross-link slot)
|  +- maintenance-window.md             (scheduled maintenance announcement template)
+- reports/
|  +- README.md                         (status page audit report shape)
+- research/
   +- research-summary.md               (executive summary from scripture-historian)
   +- index.md                          (manifest of all source files)
   +- external/                         (11 source notes from literature sweep)

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Platform quick-reference (2026)

Platform	Free tier	Entry paid	SMS	Self-host	Best for
Atlassian Statuspage	100 subs / 25 components	$29/mo	Included (create/resolve only)	No	Atlassian/PagerDuty shops
Better Stack	10 monitors	$29/mo	$29/mo per responder (unlimited)	No	All-in-one consolidation
Instatus	200 subs / 15 monitors	$20/mo	BYOC (Twilio/Vonage)	No	Value + channel breadth
Cachet	N/A	Free	v2.x only	Yes (BSD-3)	OSS communication layer
OpenStatus	Yes	$30/mo	No	Yes (MIT)	OSS with cloud option

Full decision tree and scoring in guides/00-platform-selection.md.

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Pairing

Role	Artifact
This stinger	.
Paired Bee	../../agents/status-page-worker-bee.md
Command Brief	ai-tools/command-briefs/status-page-worker-bee-command-brief.md
Related: monitoring/alerting	devops-worker-bee
Related: operational runbooks	runbook-writing-worker-bee
Related: incident postmortem authorship	library-worker-bee

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Forged by stinger-forge from status-page-worker-bee-command-brief.md and research/. Part of The Hive by Mario Aldayuz a.k.a @thenotoriousllama.