# How to Vibe Code Your Own Checkly (and Stop Paying for It)

> The active reliability layer for developers & agents

- Site: https://checklyhq.com
- Category: Developer Tools & Monitoring
- Verdict: **Serious undertaking** (45/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 4-6 weeks of focused development

## Verdict

You can build a personal dashboard wrapper and simple uptime ping worker, but orchestrating secure global Playwright sandboxes and low-drift scheduling takes serious engineering.

Checkly combines a TypeScript configuration parser, a multi-region scheduling queue, and isolated headless browser execution runners. While building a single-server HTTP pinger is straightforward, vibecoding a faithful multi-region synthetic monitoring cluster with real Playwright execution, OpenTelemetry trace ingestion, and Slack/PagerDuty routing requires wrestling with Docker container sandboxing, queue concurrency limits, and worker geographic distribution that will test your patience.

### What you can't replicate

- Global infrastructure footprint spanning 22+ secure data center regions
- Enterprise compliance (SOC 2, SAML/SSO) and guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA
- Massive multi-tenant test runner capacity processing millions of checks daily

## What it does

Synthetic monitoring, uptime checks, and API tests defined as code and integrated into agentic workflows.

### Core features

- HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, DNS, and ICMP ping monitoring engine
- Cron heartbeat (ping-based) monitoring with grace periods
- Playwright-powered synthetic browser check execution
- Monitoring as code (TypeScript/CLI parser and runner)
- Multi-channel alerting routing (Slack, Webhooks, PagerDuty)
- Public-facing status pages with component uptime status
- AI Root Cause Analysis diagnostics inspector

## The business

### Pricing

- Hobby: $0/mo
- Starter: $24/mo
- Team: $64/mo
- Enterprise: Custom

### Funding

$32.3M raised.
- Seed Round ($2.4M, 2021)
- Series A ($10M, 2021)
- Series B ($20M, 2024)
Investors: Balderton Capital, Accel, CRV, Guillermo Rauch

Founded 2018.
Team size: ~51.

## The hard parts

- Orchestrating distributed global runner nodes to execute sub-minute checks without execution drift
- Isolating, sandboxing, and resource-capping concurrent Playwright Chromium instances safely
- Capturing, structuring, and storing high-throughput OpenTelemetry traces alongside check failures
- Reliably dispatching webhook and notification alerts across third-party APIs without blocking workers

## How to vibe code Checkly

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Required for runtime execution of Next.js dashboard and CLI runner daemon
- GitHub (free): Code repository and CI/CD triggers for deployment

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class agentic coding tool for scaffolding complex multi-file TypeScript runners and worker daemons
- Cursor: Ideal editor for reviewing code diffs across dashboard React components and scheduling workers

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js
- Backend: Next.js API Routes & Node.js Worker Daemons
- Database: Turso
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: None
- Other: Playwright, Tailwind CSS, Resend

### Hosting

- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js frontend dashboard and REST API endpoints): $0/mo
- Fly.io (Running the persistent background checker worker daemon and Playwright execution containers): ~$5/mo

### Build guide

1. **Database Schema & Project Scaffolding** — Initialize the Next.js application, configure Tailwind CSS, set up Turso with Drizzle ORM, and define tables for checks, check runs, regions, and alert channels.

```
Scaffold a new Next.js 16 project using TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, and App Router. Set up Drizzle ORM connected to Turso. Create database schemas for 'checks' (id, name, type [HTTP, BROWSER, HEARTBEAT], url, frequency, locations, status), 'check_runs' (id, checkId, region, status, responseTime, error, timestamp), and 'alert_channels' (id, type, targetUrl). Implement better-auth for single-user authentication. Ensure clean modular file organization under src/db and src/app.
```

2. **Uptime & Protocol Monitoring Engine** — Build a Node.js worker service that periodically fetches target HTTP endpoints, measures latency, evaluates assertions, and logs results.

```
Create a background worker service in Node.js that queries active HTTP and API checks from Turso based on their frequency schedule. Implement robust fetch requests with timeout limits, status code validation, response time measurement, and assertion evaluation. Write results to the 'check_runs' table. Handle transient network errors by supporting a single automatic retry before flagging a check as failing.
```

3. **Synthetic Browser Check Runner** — Integrate Playwright inside an isolated worker process to execute multi-step user interaction scripts and capture error traces.

```
Implement a synthetic browser check execution module using Playwright. The module should accept a test script snippet or URL workflow, execute it within a headless Chromium sandbox with strict memory and timeout limits (30 seconds), and capture screenshots, console logs, and performance timings on failure. Store execution artifacts securely and report the run result back to the core database.
```

4. **Heartbeat & Cron Monitoring** — Implement push-based heartbeat endpoints that monitor background cron jobs and alert when expected signals are missed.

```
Build heartbeat monitoring endpoints in Next.js (/v1/heartbeat/[pingId]). Create database models to track expected ping intervals and grace periods. Implement a background cleanup routine that identifies missed heartbeats and automatically triggers failure events and alert routing when a cron job fails to check in on schedule.
```

5. **Alert Routing & Status Pages** — Build an alert dispatcher supporting Slack webhooks and email notifications, alongside a public status page frontend.

```
Create an alert dispatching engine that triggers webhook payloads to Slack channels and sends transactional notification emails via Resend when checks transition between passing and failing states. In parallel, build a public-facing status page route (/status/[slug]) that renders current system component health, uptime percentages, and active incidents based on recent check runs.
```

6. **AI Root Cause Analysis & Dashboard UI** — Build the monitoring dashboard UI and integrate Claude API to provide automated diagnostic explanations for failed test runs.

```
Build the main dashboard UI in Next.js with Tailwind CSS, featuring a list view of all checks, filterable by status and type, real-time availability graphs, and detailed run history tables. Integrate the Anthropic API to create a 'Rocky AI' diagnostic action button on failed check runs that inspects console logs, error messages, and network traces to generate a plain-language root cause explanation and suggested code fix.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- Custom domain (optional): $12/yr
- Total: ~$12 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Fly.io worker compute: $5/mo
- Turso database & Vercel: $0/mo
- Total: ~$5/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $24/mo (Starter plan)
- Build time: 45-60 hours
- AI tool credits: $20 (Claude Pro)
- Break-even: Never (built for learning and personal infrastructure control)

## Sources

- [Checkly Website & Product Documentation](https://checklyhq.com)
- [PitchBook Company Profile — Checkly](https://pitchbook.com)