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Free uptime monitoring · the honest version

“Free” is a five-minute blind spot.

Free monitoring plans check every 5 minutes, from one place, and have a documented habit of being retired without asking you first. up4 sells the boring alternative: choose an interval down to 10 seconds, pay €9 per million executions with a €3 monthly minimum, and see the cost before you save. You start with €3 of credit, no card required.

Start with €3 credit Run the blind-spot test

€3 starting credit · no card · every feature unlocked

The blind-spot test

Press the button. Watch three plans notice.

One simulated outage, three check cadences. The clocks start when the site goes down and stop when each plan first sees it. The up4 row keeps running: the first failure triggers two instant parallel confirmation checks, then the alert goes out. Nothing real breaks.

t + 0:00
up4 every 10 s · parallel re-check, alert ~3 s later
seen · 5 s in → alert sent · 8 s in
typical paid plan every 60 s
first sees it · 45 s in
typical free plan every 5 min
first sees it · 3 min 45 s in
example run · outage at t0 = 1:15 · press the button for your own roll

The free plan is not lying to you — it is just asleep between checks. And note the asymmetry: the other rows stop at first sighting — their alert still has to follow. The up4 clock already includes two confirmation checks and the alert itself. Every re-run rolls a new outage. The 5-minute row never wins.

The fine print of free

What a free plan actually charges you.

The blind spot

Five-minute checks mean an outage can live 4 minutes 59 seconds unobserved. Short incidents — deploys gone wrong, crash loops, TLS renewals — happen precisely at that scale. Many never appear in a free plan’s history at all.

The lifespan

Free tiers are funding problems with a UI. Freshping was retired in March 2026 and took tens of thousands of monitor setups with it — the migration page exists because of it. A paid meter with public arithmetic does not get sunset.

The ceiling

The moment you need what monitoring is for — faster checks, a status page on your domain, teammates — the free plan hands you the price list it was always holding. Here the feature set is identical on every plan; only volume is priced.

Free, honestly priced

The honest price of “free” is €3.

€9 per million checks, €3 monthly minimum. Three small fleets, worked out — the calculator takes any other shape.

5 monitors · every 60 s
216,000 checks × €9 / million€1.94
monthly minimum applies€3.00
total / month€3.00

Sixty-second checks — already six times a free plan’s cadence.

10 monitors · every 60 s
432,000 checks × €9 / million€3.89
minimum (€3) already included—
total / month€3.89

The €3 starting credit covers most of the first month.

3 critical monitors · every 10 s
777,600 checks × €9 / million€7.00
10-second interval, each execution metered above€0 extra
total / month€7.00

The cadence others gate behind sales calls, on three monitors that matter.

Wallet, not subscription.Top up from €10 — every deduction is visible.
At zero: pause, never delete.History, pages and settings wait for you.
Spend alerts included.We alert on our own invoices too.
FAQ

Fair questions about paying at all

Why is there no free plan?
Because free plans are paid for by someone — the paying customers above them, an acquirer’s patience, or the day the vendor retires the product. Freshping went dark in March 2026 and tens of thousands of monitors went with it. Monitoring is the one tool that must not have a quiet funding problem, so ours does not.
What do I get for €0, then?
A trial with every released feature — client accounts included — funded by €3 of real starting credit, no card required. At 10 monitors on 60-second checks that is about three weeks; at five monitors, a full month. The product shows the current runway instead of a fixed deadline banner.
What does a small fleet actually cost?
Five monitors on 60-second checks: €3.00 (the monthly minimum). Ten monitors: €3.89. A whole 50-monitor free-plan fleet at its usual 5-minute cadence: €3.89. The pricing page has the live calculator — it is the exact production formula.
What happens when my balance hits zero?
You will see it coming: we warn you in good time, based on your real usage, and auto-reload can top up by itself. If it does hit zero, monitoring does not go dark — grace mode keeps every check running at a 5-minute cadence, free, for 7 days, with alerts and status pages live. Only after that do checks pause, and nothing is ever deleted. Top up and everything resumes where it left off.
Are there hidden costs?
No seat pricing, no per-feature upsells, no interval gates. Every check type has the same rate, paused monitors send no checks, and the €3 monthly minimum is shown before signup. Prices are net; VAT applies at checkout where it applies.
I am leaving a specific free plan. Where do I start?
If you come from UptimeRobot, the switching page reprices your exact fleet. Ex-Freshping users have their own page. Everyone else: paste your URLs into the batch import and you are monitoring before the kettle boils.

Free was never free. €3 is €3.

Start monitoring Leaving UptimeRobot?

€3 starting credit · no card · nothing deleted at zero