I'm a solo dev, and I got tired of signing up for monitoring services that require installing agents, browser extensions, or wiring up Slack/PagerDuty just to know if my side project is down.

So I built ArkWatch: a free uptime monitoring API with zero dependencies. No SDK, no npm package, no webhook setup. Just curl + your email.

One command to start monitoring:

  curl -X POST https://watch.arkforge.fr/monitors \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"url":"https://yoursite.com","email":"you@example.com"}'

That's it. Your URL gets checked every 5 minutes. If it goes down, you get an email. No dashboard to check, no account to manage, no vendor lock-in.

It also has an AI layer (Mistral) that summarizes what actually changed on a page – useful for tracking competitor pricing or changelog updates. But the core use case is dead-simple uptime alerts.

Stack: Python/FastAPI, hosted on Hetzner EU. Free tier: 3 URLs, 5-min checks. Paid starts at €9/month for more URLs and faster intervals.

I'd love feedback from HN – especially on what you'd want from a zero-dependency monitoring tool. Try it, break it, tell me what's missing.