I've seen senior engineers at big companies with worse monitoring than a solo dev selling a $29 product

I've seen senior engineers at big companies with worse monitoring than a solo dev selling a $29 product.

How is that possible?

When a payment fails at 2am, the indie hacker knows by 2:01.

Slack ping. Maybe a text. They set this up before launch.

At bigger companies? You find out Monday when someone checks a dashboard.

Maybe.

Solo founders monitor like paranoid operators because one missed webhook is grocery money gone.

You feel it immediately.

Corporate engineers inherit systems where alerts are someone else's job.

Big company devs often inherit systems.

Someone else set up the alerts. Or didn't.

You fix bugs when tickets come in. You don't feel the revenue hit directly.

The feedback loop is broken.

The difference isn't skill. It's ownership.

Indie hackers monitor like their rent depends on it.

Because it does.

If you work at a company: pretend your bonus is tied to every error you catch before a user reports it.