DE Start monitoring
Better Stack alternative · migration-friendly

One meter beats four line items.

Better Stack is a good product with an additive invoice: $29 per responder, then $21 per 50 extra monitors, then $17 per 10 extra heartbeats, and white-label on a status page is a $250-a-month add-on. Here there is one meter — €9 per million checks — and seats, heartbeats and white-label are not on it at all.

Start with €3 credit See pricing

€3 starting credit · no card · batch import included

Line by line

What each invoice is actually made of.

—Better Stackup4
Seats$29 per responder, per monthUnlimited, on every plan
Monitors10 included, then $21 per 50up to 50 metered · 100 on Team · 500 on Agency
Fastest check interval30 seconds10 seconds
Cron & heartbeatsSeparate meter: 10 included, then $17 per 10Inbound pings — they cost nothing
Status page, white-label$250 / month add-onIncluded
Status page, password or IP allowlist$50 / $250 per monthIncluded
Data residencyUS-basedEU, German infrastructure, signed DPA
Worked examples

Three real teams, both invoices.

Their column adds up the packs their pricing page sells; ours is €9 per million checks with a €3 minimum, or the flat plan when the flat plan wins. Full formula on the pricing page.

One engineer · 10 monitors · every 60 s
432,000 checks × €9 / million€3.89
Better Stack: 1 responder$29.00
total / month€3.89
Three engineers · 60 monitors · 20 heartbeats
2,592,000 checks — fits Team’s 20 M budget€9.00
Better Stack: 3 responders + 1 monitor pack + 1 heartbeat pack$125.00
with the Team plan€9.00
The same fleet, white-labelled
white-label status pageincluded
Better Stack: the same $125, plus the white-label add-on$375.00
with the Team plan€9.00

Public list prices, betterstack.com/uptime/pricing, July 2026, annual billing where that is their cheaper number. If we got a number wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Migration

Move in an afternoon. A short one.

01

Paste your URLs

Copy your monitor list out of Better Stack and paste it into the batch import. Every line becomes a monitor, with the usage preview showing before you save.

02

Move the heartbeats

Create a heartbeat per job and swap the ping URL in your crontab. They are inbound requests here, so the number of them never changes your bill.

03

Wire the alerts

Connect Slack, email, PagerDuty or twelve more channels, then group them into alert plans and an on-call rotation — no per-responder charge.

04

Rebuild the status page

Pick monitors, set a slug, import subscribers via CSV. White-label and access control are switches, not add-ons.

FAQ

Switching questions, answered plainly

Is Better Stack worse?
No — and we would rather say so than pretend. Their incident-management depth, their log and metric telemetry, and their polish are real, and if you buy the whole observability suite the bundle can make sense. What we dispute is the shape of the bill for the monitoring part: paying per responder, per monitor pack, per heartbeat pack and per status-page feature means the invoice grows when your team grows, not when your load does.
Do you have log management and metrics?
No. We do active monitoring — uptime, ping, TCP, DNS, cron and heartbeat checks — plus status pages, incidents, on-call and reports. If you need log ingestion and dashboards, keep a telemetry vendor; most people who switch to us replaced only the uptime and cron lines.
Why are heartbeats free here?
Because a heartbeat is your job calling us. There is no outbound check to pay for — the request is inbound, and we do not meter inbound requests. Plan limits still apply on the count (20 on pay as you go, 50 on Team, 100 on Agency), but the pings themselves never appear on the meter.
What about 30-second versus 10-second checks?
Better Stack tops out at 30 seconds. Here 10 seconds is available on every plan — it is priced, not gated. One single-region monitor at 10 seconds uses 259,200 checks in a 30-day month, which is €2.33 on the meter and well inside Team’s 20-million budget.
Can I bring my status page subscribers?
Yes, via CSV import. The page itself is included on every plan with translations, white-label, custom domain and optional IP allowlist or access link — none of which are separately priced here.
Where does up4 run?
German infrastructure in the EU, from published egress IPs with an honest user agent, and a signed DPA as a download. Better Stack is US-based; depending on your privacy review that matters or it does not — we just state it.

One product. One meter.

Start monitoring See pricing

€3 starting credit · no card · unlimited seats