01
Two channels, one setup
Email and RSS/Atom feeds, so customers pick how they want to receive updates. Some customers would rather get a direct email; others already run everything through an RSS reader alongside their other feeds — offering both means you're not forcing everyone into the one channel that happens to be easiest for you to set up. Offering both costs nothing extra to set up and meets more customers exactly where they already are. It's a small decision that removes friction for a wider range of customers.
02
Instant, not batched
Notifications go out the moment an incident opens or a new update posts. There's no delay while updates queue up to be sent in a batch — the moment you post "investigating" or "resolved," subscribers see it, which matters most in the first few minutes of an incident when speed of communication is worth the most. That speed is what makes a subscription meaningfully better than a page someone has to remember to check. There's no reason a customer should ever be the one to tell you your own status page is out of date.
03
Cuts inbound support volume
Fewer "is this down for you too?" messages when customers already know before they ask. Customers who are already subscribed and already know about an outage don't reach for the support form the way one who's caught off guard would — the subscription does the reassuring before a ticket ever gets opened. It's a quiet, compounding benefit — fewer tickets means more time for the team to actually fix things. It's the kind of quiet efficiency that compounds the more incidents a team goes through.