Indie Developers Lack Lightweight Anomaly Detection Without Infrastructure Overhead

Small-scale operators running multiple services often don't know something is broken until end users report it, because production-grade monitoring tools require significant infrastructure (databases, time-series stores, dashboards) that is disproportionate to their needs. The underlying problem is the gap between heavyweight observability platforms and having no detection at all — there is no credible middle ground for developers who want statistical anomaly alerting without ops burden. This leaves them relying on reactive feedback loops rather than proactive signals.