It seems to me that it would be valuable to add a “stop” feature to Netlify which would not force people to push an empty or heavily modified git commit to the repo.
Maybe, there could be a button to stop the service for a given app, hopefully allowing us to pass the URL of another Git repo, which we could configure with a website with some type of “under maintenance” message.
Hey there, @fabionolasco 
Thanks so much for taking the time to share this with us. I have forwarded your idea to the Product team for consideration.
Hi Fabio, member of the Netlify product team here! Thanks for providing feedback.
Would you mind sharing a little bit more about what you’re aiming to achieve? It sounds like you want to intermittently replace your full public web app with a downtime/maintenance page, is that right?
If you’re fine with swapping out the production repo with a “down for maintenance repo”, something that might help is to unlink the repository from the site, then link it to the “maintenance” repo. That will rebuild the site using the new repo. You can switch it back to the original repo at any time. The only caveat here is that unlinking a repo does clear out deploy keys, build hooks, and environment variables—just something to be aware of in case you need to maintain those!
Thanks for sharing your request!
this guide might also be helpful:
This can be an Ok solution, if the Netlify site does not lose all of the previous build, log data, etc. Would it? Either way, thank you for sharing this idea!
hi there, i don’t believe it would lose any build history/log data, no.