Do it yourself with RSS feeds, or use a tool?
5 vendors free. Component filters from $19.
Many vendor status pages publish RSS or Atom feeds, and Slack and Teams can both post feed items into a channel. For a handful of vendors this costs nothing and works. We built Outage Clock because it gets messy as the list grows.
Where the RSS approach works
- You follow fewer than five vendors
- Each one publishes a clean feed
- You are happy to see every incident for every component
- A delay between the vendor's post and the feed reader pulling it is acceptable
Where it breaks down
Not every vendor has a feed. Some status pages are plain HTML or JSON only.
No filtering. A feed sends every incident for every region and product. Following AWS by RSS can mean a lot of noise for services you have never touched.
Different formats. Titles and update text vary by vendor, so your channel ends up with inconsistent messages that are hard to scan.
Polling delays. Feed readers in chat tools poll on their own schedule, which you do not control.
No second signal. If a vendor is slow to post, a feed has nothing to post either.
Silent breakage. When a vendor moves their status page, the feed stops and nobody notices.
What Outage Clock adds
- Status pages in several formats read for you: JSON, RSS, Atom and a few HTML pages
- One message format across vendors
- Component and region filters on paid plans
- Polling every 2 to 5 minutes
- Our own reachability check per vendor
- Alerts to email, Slack, Teams or a webhook, plus a daily digest
A fair cost comparison
RSS is free in cash and costs time in setup and noise. If you only follow a few vendors, our Free plan matches the RSS approach at the same price, zero, and adds the normalized format.
FAQ
Can I still use RSS for some vendors?
Of course. Many teams start with RSS and move to a tool when the channel gets noisy.