I can't fault their service offering but their pricing seems very high when compared to similar tools in that segment.

I value Pingdom and Librato Metrics as significantly more valuable for my business and yet statuspage.io is double or even quadruple the price.

Having said all that, it's probably that tools like Librato are significantly underpriced as opposed to statuspage.io being overpriced :)

A free solution is use Cloudflare, which you can setup to serve a custom page when your server is unreachable. On that custom page include a feed from twitter / facebook / blogspot.com.

Try https://status.io/