app and api had no DNS records for most of their existence, so there was nothing to monitor - which meant status.pacestreak.com kept quietly not telling the whole story even after both went live. Fixed, plus a lesson in why a 200 from the app proves nothing about the API behind it.
A status report: what is built across the API, the app and the sites, what's tested, and the one unresolved decision (where the API runs) that everything else is waiting on.