Max Rozen

Max Rozen is an Australian software engineer based in Toulouse, France, who runs OnlineOrNot, an uptime monitoring and status page service. They started it at the beginning of 2021 as a passion project to check the uptime of their own freelance web projects, after finding around 200 existing alternatives and deciding to compete anyway.

OnlineOrNot monitors websites, APIs, cron jobs and heartbeats, and offers hosted status pages, with a free tier for personal use. Rozen runs it on their own as a self-funded, default-alive business that they describe as a lifestyle business, personally answering every customer email and keeping it free of venture capital.

They build OnlineOrNot alongside a full-time job, working on it for about two hours before each workday. They previously worked at Atlassian and now work at Cloudflare on the Workers platform, having earlier helped build the D1 database.

Rozen is known for detailed annual retrospectives on running a SaaS in a crowded market, covering lessons on free trials, pricing experiments, landing pages per feature and talking to customers instead of relying on invasive analytics. They have also written about React, including the ebook useEffect By Example and a beginner's guide to React testing.