Concept project, not commissioned

Tidewatch

Concept project, not commissioned. A marketing site for an imaginary uptime monitoring product, built to show how light a SaaS page can be.

Kind
Concept project, not commissioned
Year
2026
Our role
Design and build
Stack
HTML, CSS, A 356 byte script
The Tidewatch home page with the headline Know your site is down before your customers do, and a 90 day status chart with a few red and amber bars.

What this is

Tidewatch is not a real product. We made it to answer one question: how small can a SaaS marketing page be before it stops being a good page? There is no signup, no tracking and no data. The page says so at the top, and the status chart is sample data.

The full Tidewatch page: hero with a 90 day status chart, three steps, three sample prices, questions and a signup form.
The whole page. Pricing is sample only.

Numbers we measured

Total transfer, 4 requests
52 kB
Lighthouse, mobile run
JavaScript, gzipped
0.25 kB
One small script for the form
Lighthouse, mobile and desktop
100 / 100
Layout shift 0, blocking time 0
axe violations
0
axe-core, light and dark, 390 and 1440 px

Most of the 52 kB is one font file (47 kB). The HTML is 2.1 kB and the CSS is 1.8 kB after compression.

How the status chart works

The 90 bars are plain HTML, written when the page is built. They are not drawn by a script, so they are there on the first paint and cannot shift the layout. A screen reader does not read 90 separate bars. It reads one sentence: the period, the uptime and the number of incidents.

Decisions

Font

The choice
One self hosted variable font, loaded from our own server.
What we rejected
A font service on another domain.
Why
No extra connection to open, and the page works the same in every country. The cost is the 47 kB file, which is most of the page.

Script

The choice
No framework. One small script for the form.
What we rejected
A component framework for the page.
Why
The page has almost nothing that changes. A framework would add more code than the page has content.

Pricing

The choice
Three sample prices, with the middle plan marked.
What we rejected
A table with every feature on every plan.
Why
A visitor chooses by monitors and check speed. Those are the only differences we list.

Also covered

  • Light and dark themes that follow the visitor’s device setting.
  • Text and controls that stay readable and reachable on a 390 px phone with no sideways scroll.
  • A clear notice at the top that the product is a concept and nothing is sent or stored.

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