Free uptime monitoring: what a free tier should include, and what ours leaves out

What a free tier should include

You run a side project or a small product and want it watched without a monthly bill. Almost every monitoring tool has a free tier now, so the number that decides your morning is not the price, it is what the free tier quietly leaves out. This is the free plan of UpControl, item by item, including the places where other free tiers beat it.

The check count is the number every landing page quotes and the worst way to pick. A tier that watches 50 URLs but meters alert recipients, charges for teammates or puts the status page behind the paid line is worse at 3 a.m. than a smaller one that alerts the whole team. Before you sign up anywhere, look at these:

• Heartbeats for scheduled jobs, and whether they count against the check limit
• How many alert recipients you get, and whether a teammate who changes settings costs money
• Whether SSL certificate and domain expiry are watched or sold as a separate product
• Whether there is a public status page, and whether it can carry your own domain
• Whether a credit card is asked for on day one
• What happens when the probe cannot measure: a bot-protection wall answering 403 is not downtime, and a tool that logs it as downtime will wake you for nothing

The free plan here, item by item

From the product sheet, as of 2026-10:

Where other free tiers win

UptimeRobot's free tier, as of 2026-10, carries 50 monitors at a 5-minute interval. If the game is watching many URLs for nothing, that tier wins on count and ours does not: the free plan here is 3 checks, workspace-wide. Other honest losses:

• Checks run every 5 minutes here. The 1-minute cadence is a paid feature.
• Dashboard history is 1 day and the live log window is 24 hours on free. Paid plans reach back further.
• The free status page lives on our link, upcontrol.io/status/yourhost. Your own domain on it is paid.
• UpControl is younger than the incumbents and has fewer integrations, and no plan carries on-call rotations or phone escalation.

What the count does not show

Three checks is a small number until you notice what sits beside it. Heartbeats are free and never count, so every cron job and worker you run can be watched on the free plan with a URL it pings when it finishes, and a missed ping opens an incident on its own. Recipients are not metered on Slack, Discord or email. A teammate who changes settings is free; there is no seat tax anywhere in the product.

Two things about honesty in the numbers. SSL certificate and domain expiry are watched as part of every website check on every plan, not sold as a second product. And a probe that receives 401, 403 or 429 from a firewall or bot protection is recorded as "couldn't measure", never as an outage, so your uptime figure does not drop for a block the tool caused itself.

The wiring is free too. npx upcontrol hands the setup to the coding agent you already use, across 10 of them: you ask in plain language for a funnel or the log lines, and the agent writes it. On the free plan, with no card collected.

Start in five minutes

1. Open upcontrol.io and type your domain. A public status page for it exists from that moment, free, claimable by you, with no account.
2. Add up to three website checks for the URLs customers depend on. SSL and domain expiry come with them, nothing extra to configure.
3. Pick where alerts go: Telegram, Slack, Discord or email. Add a heartbeat to each scheduled job; heartbeats never touch the limit.
4. Run npx upcontrol in the repo if you want the log lines and the deploys beside the checks, so the incident page carries the reason and the minute it started.

The free plan is a plan, not a trial: https://upcontrol.io/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=vs&utm_campaign=engine

• Watch a site with no code, in one click
• Pricing: the free plan and what the paid plans add