Errors-as-a-Service: Breaking Things So You Don’t Have To

If you’ve ever sat in a retro where someone says “we need to invest more in chaos engineering” while the whole team is still recovering from last night’s actual chaos, you’ll understand why I built Errors-as-a-Service.

It started as a joke. “What if we just sold errors directly?” Because let’s be real: half of us are basically paying vendors thousands a month for errors anyway. At least mine are cheaper, funnier, and come with a guarantee that nothing will work right.

Why I Made It

I love chaos engineering as a concept, but in practice it’s like buying a treadmill you never use. Everyone talks about it, no one runs the drills, and when something really fails it’s always because of the one thing nobody tested. So I built a parody: a service that does the one thing everyone’s afraid of—randomly breaking your stuff.

It’s catharsis disguised as a product. And it’s a parody of SaaS culture at large: fake fundraising news, feature matrices nobody asked for, and a “status page” that’s basically just a public diary of my mistakes.

Why It’s Funny (and a Little Too Real)

Because anyone in engineering has lived this:

  • A status page that’s permanently stuck on “degraded performance” — less a metric, more a lifestyle.
  • Release notes that proudly ship “Docs with typos” as if that’s a feature flag.
  • “Community support” that’s basically three Reddit posts, one unanswered Slack thread, and a maintainer who last logged in during the Obama administration.
  • An “Enterprise” plan that’s the same as free, just with a bigger invoice and more sales calls.
  • Monitoring alerts that only fire after the customer has already emailed support.
  • An SLA written entirely in vague adjectives and hope.

Errors-as-a-Service takes all of that and says the quiet part out loud. It’s failure as a feature.

Why It Matters (Sort Of)

I’m not pretending this is useful. Nobody is going to pay for my API to inject random 503s into production (…probably). But that’s not the point. The point is that engineers need outlets for the absurdity of what we do every day. Some people blog. Some people make memes. I build fake startups that collapse on purpose.

Because honestly? Reliability is boring. Outages are where the good stories come from.