---
title: 'Yorker vs home-rolled monitoring'
description: 'TCO: 60–120 engineer-hours to build, 4–8 hr/month to maintain, plus infra, vs $29.99/month for Yorker.'
canonical_url: 'https://yorkermonitoring.com/compare/home-rolled'
---

# 108–216+ engineer-hours in year one
## or $29.99 a month

Yorker vs home-rolled monitoring

Building your own synthetic monitoring stack is possible, and many teams have done it. This page is a realistic, line-by-line look at what it actually costs (in engineer-hours and infrastructure) to build and run what Yorker already ships out of the box.

Yorker is OTel-native synthetic monitoring for developers and SRE teams, built by Reverse Sweep Ltd. It runs HTTP/API and Playwright browser checks, captures filmstrip screenshots, scores anomalies, correlates synthetic checks into your own backend via traceparent, and emits standard OTLP to any OTel-compatible backend. The question this page answers is simple: is building and maintaining all of that yourself a better use of your team's time than $29.99/month?

Last verified 2026-04-11.

## Assumptions: read before using this data

All cost estimates use public inputs. No proprietary data.

- **Engineer cost:** $150k/year fully loaded (US mid-market SWE/SRE). $75/hour at 2,000 hr/year.
- **Infrastructure:** AWS us-east-1 public prices (April 2026). Single-region. t3.small for HTTP, t3.medium for browser.
- **Scope:** HTTP checks + Playwright browser checks + alerting + result storage + screenshots. One region. No OTel unless noted.
- **What's excluded:** Second and third regions (+$63/mo or $756/yr each). OTel emission (+20–40 hr build). SLA/compliance reporting.

## Year-1 total cost of ownership

Build cost is one-time; maintenance and infrastructure recur. Yorker's cost is flat. Home-rolled costs front-load in year 1 and continue at a lower but non-zero rate in subsequent years.

| Cost category | Home-rolled year 1 | Yorker year 1 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Initial build** (60–120 engineer-hours × $75/hr) | $4,500 – $9,000 | n/a |
| **Ongoing maintenance** (4–8 hr/mo × $75/hr × 12 mo) | $3,600 – $7,200 | n/a |
| **OTel emission (optional)** (20–40 engineer-hours to build OTLP sender, not in totals below) | $1,500 – $3,000 one-time | Included |
| **Runner infrastructure** (t3.small HTTP at $15/mo + t3.medium browser at $30/mo, 1 region) | $540/yr | Included in plan |
| **Result storage** (RDS t3.micro ~$15/mo) | $180/yr | Included in plan |
| **Screenshot storage** (S3 standard, ~$3/mo at small scale) | $36/yr | Included in plan |
| **Platform / subscription** ($29.99/month flat) | n/a | $359.88/yr |
| **Year-1 total** (excludes OTel build (optional) and second region, +$63/mo or $756/yr) | **$8,856 – $16,956** | **$359.88** |

All assumptions are stamped above and use public data. Year-2 home-rolled cost drops to maintenance + infrastructure only ($3,600–$7,200 + $756/yr = $4,356–$7,956/yr) vs Yorker at $359.88/yr, still 12–22× higher.

## What you'd need to build

This is the engineering scope behind what Yorker already ships. Each line item is a real engineering project, not a weekend script.

- **HTTP check scheduler (8–15 hr):** Poll-based or cron-based scheduler that dispatches HTTP checks at configurable intervals, handles retries, tracks consecutive failures for alert hysteresis, and persists results to a database.
- **Playwright browser runner (15–25 hr):** Isolated headless Chromium execution with per-step screenshot capture, network request logging for the waterfall view, and clean teardown after each run. Playwright version pinning and update policy matter: a stale Playwright breaks checks silently.
- **Result storage and query layer (8–12 hr):** Schema design for check results (timestamps, durations, assertion outcomes, screenshot paths), pagination for result history, time-series aggregation for availability SLA calculations, and data retention policies.
- **Screenshot storage pipeline (4–8 hr):** Upload per-step screenshots to object storage (S3 or equivalent), generate pre-signed URLs for UI display, manage lifecycle policies so storage costs don't compound indefinitely.
- **Alerting and notification routing (8–16 hr):** Consecutive-failure detection, alert rule evaluation, deduplication so a 10-minute outage doesn't trigger 10 separate pages, and integration with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack, or your incident management tool.
- **OTLP emission layer (20–40 hr):** Custom OTLP HTTP JSON exporter that wraps check results in the ResourceMetrics envelope, attaches correct resource attributes (check ID, location, run ID), and submits to your backend. No off-the-shelf library does this for synthetic checks: you build it from the OTLP spec.
- **Multi-region orchestration (16–24 hr per additional region):** Deploying runners in multiple regions requires a control plane that dispatches checks to the correct region, aggregates results, and handles region-specific network isolation. Each additional region multiplies the ops surface.
- **Private network agent (10–20 hr):** An outbound-only agent that polls a control plane for check assignments, executes them inside your private network, and submits results without inbound connectivity: the polling model is non-trivial to get right without race conditions or polling-interval drift.

## Frequently asked questions

### Why would I pay $29.99 when I could build this myself?

You could, and many teams have. The question is whether the 60–120 engineer-hours of initial build, plus 4–8 hours/month of ongoing maintenance, plus infrastructure costs, is a better use of your team's time than $29.99/month. At $75/hour, even the low estimate of the first year costs 25× what Yorker costs in year 1 (47× at the high end).

### Are the engineer-hour estimates realistic?

The 60-hour low estimate assumes a skilled engineer working on nothing else and accepting significant scope tradeoffs: HTTP checks only, one region, basic alerting, no OTel, no screenshot filmstrip. The 120-hour high estimate is for a system with HTTP + browser checks, multi-region, alert routing, OTel emission, and result storage. Both are point-in-time estimates; ongoing Playwright version upgrades, alert tuning, and flakiness triage are real ongoing costs that don't appear in the build number.

### What's the hardest part to build yourself?

OTel emission is the part most teams underestimate. Writing an OTLP HTTP JSON exporter that correctly structures synthetic check metrics (ResourceMetrics envelope, DataPoint attributes, exemplar trace IDs) takes 20–40 hours to get right. Playwright version upgrades are the ongoing cost most teams underestimate: Playwright ships regularly, browser binaries need updating, and flaky checks accumulate.

### What does Yorker not do that a home-rolled system can?

A few genuinely bespoke cases sit outside what any product handles for you: exotic non-HTTP protocols, result schemas hand-shaped to an internal data model, fully air-gapped deployment with zero cloud dependency, or unbounded raw retention. Those are real edge cases, and you can still pair a custom runner for them with Yorker's OTLP output. For everything else (HTTP/API and Playwright browser checks, monitoring-as-code, anomaly scoring, traceparent correlation into your own backend, standard OTLP, the filmstrip, 14 regions, private locations) you get it today without building or maintaining any of it yourself.

### Does the infrastructure cost change significantly at scale?

At low check volumes (tens of checks per team), the estimates above hold. At high volumes (thousands of checks, multiple regions), you'd need larger instances, a queue for check dispatch, horizontal scaling, and more sophisticated result storage, and costs rise faster than linearly. Yorker handles scale without you needing to architect it.

### Can I use Yorker's OTel output alongside my own monitoring?

Yes. Yorker emits OTLP to any backend: if you have an existing Prometheus, Grafana, or Honeycomb stack, Yorker plugs into it. You can replace the Yorker runner with your own checks for any custom type we don't support, while using Yorker for the standard HTTP and browser coverage.

## Skip the build queue

Start free, no credit card, and run your first Playwright browser check in minutes. The 120 engineer-hours of build effort is already spent. $29.99/month to use the result. Start free or see pricing.