Almost every certificate monitor charges by the certificate, which quietly turns adding a host into a budget decision. CertPost does not: $29 a month covers unlimited certificates. For anyone managing a lot of them — an agency, a hosting company, a team with a sprawling estate — that single choice changes the arithmetic more than any feature on the page.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is CertPost worth it?
For anyone past about thirty certificates, yes, and the maths is not close. Unlimited certificates at $29 a month undercuts per-domain competitors badly at scale, and the product itself is sound: it checks from outside the way a visitor does, follows the whole chain rather than just the leaf, and includes domain expiry on every plan. Below thirty certificates the advantage disappears and cheaper or free options make more sense.
CertPost is an external certificate monitor. It connects to your endpoints from outside, exactly as a visitor would, and reads the certificate actually being served rather than trusting what a renewal log claims was installed.
That distinction is the product's argument. A renewal can succeed on paper and still leave the old certificate in place on one server behind a load balancer, and only something looking from outside will catch it.
It checks every link in the chain rather than the leaf certificate alone, which catches the failure where an intermediate expires and takes the site down even though your own certificate is perfectly valid. Domain registration expiry is monitored alongside, on every plan including the free one.
A clear pricing idea, executed with a few genuinely good details.
The Team plan at $29 a month has no certificate ceiling. Adding a host is never a cost decision, which is the whole pitch.
Every link is checked for expiry, not just your own certificate. An expired intermediate breaks a site just as thoroughly and is far easier to miss.
It reads what visitors actually receive, so a renewal that succeeded but was never deployed is still caught.
Registration dates are watched alongside certificates, including on the free tier. A lapsed domain is the same outage by a different route.
Warnings at 30, 14, 7 and 1 day, one message per event, plus a weekly all-clear. The design is explicitly about not training you to ignore it.
The $79 tier adds status pages per client and 15-minute checks, which is aimed squarely at people managing certificates on behalf of others.
Three tiers, and the middle one is the product.
| Plan | Price | Certificates | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3 | Daily checks, email and webhook alerts, no card |
| Team | $29/mo | Unlimited | Hourly checks, change alerts, 5 seats |
| Agency | $79/mo | Unlimited | 15-minute checks, client status pages |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
On price at scale, CertPost wins and it is not a close call. Unlimited certificates for $29 beats our $34 Pro plan capped at 100 monitors the moment you pass a hundred certificates, and our per-monitor model is simply the wrong shape for an agency with several hundred of them. Their full-chain checking is also better than ours: we read the certificate at the endpoint, and an expired intermediate is a gap we have not closed.
Our case is breadth per pound. Their Team plan does certificates and domains; our $19 Growth plan does 50 monitors that can be certificates, uptime checks, domain watches, page change watches, heartbeats or any mix, with status pages included. Our expiry window is configurable from 1 to 60 days against their fixed four-point schedule, and we alert when a certificate has already expired and when the check itself fails.
The honest split: hundreds of certificates and nothing else — theirs. Dozens of certificates as part of a wider monitoring problem — ours.
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.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
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.
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.
Free for 3 certificates with daily checks, $29 a month for unlimited certificates with hourly checks and 5 seats, and $79 a month for 15-minute checks and client status pages. Verify current pricing on their site.
Pricing is per account rather than per certificate, so the Team plan has no ceiling on how many you monitor. At a few hundred certificates that is dramatically cheaper than per-domain competitors.
A certificate chain is only as valid as its weakest link. If an intermediate expires, browsers reject the connection even though your own certificate is fine — and a monitor that only reads the leaf will report everything as healthy.
Yes, on every plan including the free one. A domain that lapses takes the site down as completely as a certificate that expires.
At 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before expiry, one message per event, with a weekly confirmation when everything is fine. The lead times are fixed rather than configurable.
No. It covers certificates and domain registration. If you also need to know the site is responding, that is a separate tool.
For a personal site with one or two certificates, yes. Three certificates is small against free tiers elsewhere that cover hundreds, so the free plan is best read as a trial of the paid one.
Past a hundred certificates, theirs is cheaper and their chain checking is better than ours. Below that, our $19 plan covers 50 monitors of any type — certificates, uptime, domains, page changes, heartbeats — where theirs covers certificates and domains only.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
For hundreds of certificates and nothing else, CertPost is cheaper and we say so. For a mixed estate, start at $5 a month.