How Hyperping helps Refiner close enterprise deals and catch downtime before AWS does

Results

Refiner is a customer feedback solution for SaaS and mobile app companies. Since 2019, they've helped software teams launch in-app surveys and collect user feedback when users are actively using their products.

For a company positioning itself as "nearly infrastructure provider," downtime means their customers lose data. This reality shapes every decision Moritz Dausinger, founder of Refiner, makes about monitoring and reliability.

We spoke with Moritz about how Hyperping provides the external monitoring perspective that complements their internal AWS setup, and how their public status page has become an unexpected closer in enterprise sales conversations.

The results: Faster alerts and closed deals

"If we receive an alert from Hyperping, something is on, and we need to react really fast. And then we have weekly recaps where we see if response times went up or down."

Refiner has achieved tangible benefits from their monitoring setup:

• Earlier incident detection: Hyperping alerts sometimes arrive before AWS CloudWatch notifies them
• Global visibility: Multi-location monitoring provides a complete picture of response times worldwide
• Sales acceleration: The status page showing high uptime ends SLA discussions with enterprise prospects
• Validated confidence: Weekly recaps provide concrete data to confirm their perception of system performance
• Independent verification: External monitoring that operates separately from their infrastructure

Why availability is non-negotiable for infrastructure-adjacent SaaS

"Availability is very important for us because we are seeing ourselves as kind of nearly infrastructure provider. So, it's really important that our service is up and running. Our customers are software companies who are relying on our platform and if it's down, they're losing data."

When your customers are other software companies integrating your product into their user experience, you can't afford unreliability. For Refiner, it's unacceptable to have customers lose valuable feedback data that can never be recovered.

This reality drives their comprehensive approach to monitoring and reliability. Every decision is filtered through one question: How does this protect our customers' data?

Internal monitoring isn't enough: The need for an external perspective

"We are using many services of AWS, and notably CloudWatch. We have multiple dashboards with CloudWatch to look at application metrics. We have obviously alerts in CloudWatch if we have unhealthy hosts, high CPU, etc. All the stuff we can measure inside AWS, we use CloudWatch for."

Refiner's internal monitoring setup is robust. They've invested heavily in AWS CloudWatch, building multiple dashboards to track application metrics, host health, CPU usage, and every measurable aspect of their infrastructure.

But internal monitoring has blind spots.

"We also want to have a view on our system from the outside. And this is where Hyperping comes in. It is basically an independent monitoring solution for us, just looking from the outside, pinging the API and the websites and all the crucial parts of our infrastructure."

This external perspective provides critical advantages:

• True user experience: Monitoring from the outside shows what customers actually experience
• Independent verification: A monitoring system that doesn't rely on the same infrastructure it's monitoring
• Geographic diversity: Understanding how the service performs from different locations worldwide

"And Hyperping does that also from different locations. So, we have a better picture about response times for our API or services from various locations around the world."

This multi-location approach is particularly valuable for a service used globally, providing insights into regional performance variations that would be invisible from a single monitoring perspective.

Real-time alerts that beat internal systems

"We have the real-time alerts from Hyperping telling us if the app is down. These are sometimes arriving even before AWS notices or notifies us. So, that's a crucial part in our daily process."

The most striking benefit of external monitoring has been unexpected: faster incident detection than their own infrastructure provider.

When a Hyperping alert arrives, the team knows to act immediately:

"If you receive an alert from Hyperping, something is on, and we need to react really fast."

This early warning system provides precious minutes during incidents, time that can mean the difference between a brief hiccup and significant data loss for customers.

The weekly recaps serve a different but equally important purpose:

"We have the weekly recaps where we see if response times went up or down. That's just to confirm the perception we already had about the week, but it's nice to have as well."

These summaries provide concrete validation of the team's intuitive sense of how the system performed, transforming feelings into measurable data.

The status page that closes enterprise deals

"We are also using Hyperping's status pages. First to communicate with our customers. And also we are using this as a sales collateral to show that we are available, that the availability is high."

What started as a customer communication tool has evolved into one of Refiner's most effective sales assets.

Enterprise customers conduct thorough due diligence before committing to infrastructure-adjacent tools. The questions are predictable and necessary:

"Many of our customers are asking for proof before signing up. That could be the SOC 2 report. Then they want to be sure about the data security. So, we are setting up a DPA. And finally also they ask about service level agreements, SLAs."

SLA discussions can become protracted negotiations, with prospects wanting specific uptime guarantees and penalty clauses. Refiner has found a more elegant solution:

"Usually we are not providing SLAs, what we prefer to do is we just send them the status page and tell them look, we did 99.99% over the last year and this is what we are aiming for."

The impact is immediate:

"And most of the time just showing the status page ends the discussion because it's enough for them to see that."

Rather than negotiating theoretical commitments, Refiner shows concrete historical data. The transparent record of their actual uptime speaks louder than any contractual promise.

This approach offers several advantages:

• Transparency builds trust: Publicly displaying uptime history demonstrates confidence
• Data over promises: Historical performance is more credible than future guarantees
• Simplified sales process: Eliminates lengthy SLA negotiations
• Customer self-service: Prospects can verify reliability themselves