Status pages included on every plan

The Cachet alternative with nothing to host

Cachet is the open-source status page a great many teams have self-hosted over the years. It is free, customisable and yours. It also runs on infrastructure that can go down at exactly the moment you need the page.

Free plan forever · No credit card · Set up in under a minute

Is MonitoringDaddy a real Cachet alternative?

For teams who would rather not host their status page — particularly since a self-hosted one fails with the infrastructure it reports on — yes, and with monitoring included. Cachet is the better choice if you need full control, customisation or a page inside your own network.

The trigger

Why people look for a Cachet alternative

A self-hosted status page shares your fate

If the outage is at hosting or network level, the page describing it goes down too. That is the single strongest argument against self-hosting this particular thing.

Maintenance

Updates, database, backups and the PHP stack underneath it.

It still does not monitor

Cachet displays status you feed it; something else has to detect the problem.

Side by side

Cachet vs MonitoringDaddy

Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the Cachet column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.

Feature Cachet MonitoringDaddy
Public status page Yes — open source and free Yes — 1 on free, 10 on the $5 plan, 50 on Pro
Self-hosted and customisable Yes, completely No — hosted only
Survives your own outage No — it runs on your infrastructure Yes — hosted away from yours
Monitoring that opens incidents No Yes — automatic from uptime monitors
Maintenance burden Yours None
Uptime monitoring No Yes, on every plan
SSL and domain expiry No Yes, attached to a monitor
Website change detection No Yes, with word-level diffs
Cron / heartbeat monitoring No Yes — up to 100 on Pro
Cost Free, plus hosting and your time $5/mo for 10 status pages and 25 monitors
Fair comparison

What Cachet does better

Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.

  • Free and open source, with complete control over appearance and behaviour.
  • Can run inside a private network for internal status.
  • No vendor to depend on or be priced by.
  • A large body of existing deployments and community knowledge.

If any of those are load-bearing for your team, staying put is the correct decision and this page has done its job. Monitoring you actually trust beats monitoring that is marginally cheaper.

The product

What you actually get with MonitoringDaddy

Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.

Uptime monitoring

HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.

SSL certificate expiry

A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.

Domain expiry

Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.

Content change detection

Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.

Price monitoring

Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.

Hosted status pages

Public status pages included on every plan, hosted independently of your infrastructure so they stay up when you do not. See hosted status pages.

Alerts from any of these can be routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a generic webhook, and a single monitor can carry several channels at once. Everything is available through the REST API on paid plans, so monitors can be created and torn down programmatically rather than clicked through a form.

The decision

Who should switch — and who should stay

Switch if…

  • You have realised a self-hosted status page fails with your infrastructure.
  • You would rather not maintain another PHP application and database.
  • You want the monitoring that raises incidents in the same place.

Stay on Cachet if…

  • You need full control or heavy customisation.
  • The page must live inside your own network.
  • Free matters more than the hosting risk.
Pricing

What MonitoringDaddy costs

Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.

PlanMonitorsFastest intervalAlert channelsAPIPrice
Free1Every 30 minutesEmail$0
Founding Member first 20 only25Every 5 minutesEmail + webhook & chatYes$5/mo
Basic10Every 10 minutesEmail + webhook & chatYes$8/mo
Growth50Every 5 minutesEmail + webhook & chatYes$19/mo
Pro100Every 60 secondsEmail + webhook & chatYes$34/mo

Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.

Migration

Moving from Cachet without a gap in coverage

There is no automated importer — monitors are re-created by hand, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Budget about a minute per monitor.

1

Audit what you monitor

List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.

2

Re-create the critical ones

Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.

3

Run both for a week

Keep Cachet live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.

4

Switch over and cancel

Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.

Methodology

How this comparison was put together

This page is written by the team that builds MonitoringDaddy, so treat it as an informed argument rather than a neutral audit. What we can promise is that the claims about our own product are checked against what the software actually does, and the rows where Cachet is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.

Details about Cachet come from their public pricing and documentation at the time of writing. Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement, so every third-party figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.

One thing worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages fudge it: MonitoringDaddy checks run from our own infrastructure, which is external to yours, but from a single origin rather than a global probe network. That is enough to catch outages and content changes independently of your stack. It is not enough to tell you a site is down in Frankfurt but up in Ohio. If regional verification is a hard requirement, a larger platform will serve you better and we would rather you knew that now.

Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.

See it

What an alert actually looks like

Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.

competitor.com/pricing Watching: Pricing table
Pro plan — $49 per month
+ Pro plan — $39 per month
+ Save 20% with annual billing

Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.

2 words added · 1 removed · 4.1% of the watched region

retailer.com/product/… Watching: Availability
Out of stock
+ In stock — ships tomorrow
+ Add to basket

The item is available again and the basket button returned.

6 words added · 3 removed · 12.5% of the watched region

supplier.com/subprocessors Watching: Subprocessor list
~ Data is processed in the EUthe EU and the United States
+ Added: Northwind Analytics Inc. (United States)

A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.

9 words added · 2 removed · 1.8% of the watched region

Worked example — not live data. Start monitoring free
Alerts

Where we can reach you

The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.

Email Before and after images inline
Browser push On a phone or desktop lock screen
RSS feed Every recorded change, as a feed
SlackPaid Through an incoming webhook
Microsoft TeamsPaid Through an incoming webhook
DiscordPaid Through an incoming webhook
TelegramPaid Straight to a chat or channel
FlockPaid Through an incoming webhook
WebhooksPaid Post to anything you run yourself

There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.

FAQ

Cachet alternative: your questions answered

What is wrong with self-hosting a status page?

Nothing, until the outage is at hosting or network level — at which point the page explaining the outage is also down, and customers get a browser error instead of an explanation.

Is Cachet free?

Yes, open source. You pay in hosting and maintenance rather than licence.

Where are your status pages hosted?

On our infrastructure, deliberately separate from yours, so they survive the incident they are describing.

Do incidents post automatically?

Yes, from your uptime monitors. Cachet displays what you feed it.

How many status pages do I get?

One on free, 10 on the $5 plan, 20 on Growth, 50 on Pro.

Can I customise the appearance?

Branding, logo and colours on paid plans, plus a custom domain. Nothing like the freedom of editing the source yourself.

Can I run a status page on my own network?

Not with us. If internal-only is a requirement, Cachet handles it and we do not.

What else comes with it?

Uptime, SSL and domain expiry, page change detection and cron heartbeats, each with its own allowance.

Keep reading

Compare other monitoring tools

Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy

AG
Written by

Amit Gupta

Amit Gupta is the founder of MonitoringDaddy , a website and infrastructure monitoring platform built by TotosLocal One Private Limited. He writes about uptime, change detection, SSL and domain monitoring, and helps teams keep their websites fast, secure and online.

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