No check quota, no capped alerts

The Distill.io alternative for people who want it to just run

Distill is powerful and unusually configurable, and part of that power comes from running monitors on your own device through a browser extension. That is also the catch: local monitors only run while your machine is awake, and the cloud monitors that run without you are capped, quota-limited and — on the free plan — so are the emails. Here is the honest comparison.

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From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute

On this page
  1. Quick verdict
  2. Why people switch
  3. Distill.io vs MonitoringDaddy
  4. What Distill.io does better
  5. What you get
  6. Switch or stay
  7. Pricing
  8. Migration, step by step
  9. How we compared
  10. FAQ

Is MonitoringDaddy a real Distill.io alternative?

If you want pages watched reliably in the cloud without managing quotas, extensions or a machine that has to stay on, yes. Distill remains the stronger tool if you need to record interactions before a check, monitor pages behind a login on your own device, or run into the hundreds of monitors.

The trigger

Why people look for a Distill.io alternative

Local monitors need your computer running

Distill's free plan advertises 25 monitors, but only 5 of those run in the cloud. The rest run inside the browser extension on your device, which means they stop when your laptop sleeps. People discover this when they miss the change they were watching for.

Alerts themselves are metered on lower tiers

The free plan caps email alerts at 30 a month and push notifications at 100. Being rate-limited on the notification is a different kind of frustrating from being rate-limited on the check — you can be watching correctly and still not be told.

Six-hour minimum checks on free

The free tier's minimum cloud interval is six hours. For a price change or a restock, six hours is usually the difference between acting and reading about it afterwards.

Side by side

Distill.io vs MonitoringDaddy

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

Feature Distill.io MonitoringDaddy
Monthly check quota Yes — 1,000 free, 30,000 on Starter, 100,000 on Professional — verify on their site None. Checks are not metered
Cloud monitors on the free plan 5 (of 25 total; the rest run locally in your browser) 1 page watch, always in the cloud
Free plan check interval 6 hours minimum in the cloud 30 minutes
Email alerts capped Yes — 30/month on free, 2,000/month on Starter No cap
Entry paid price $15/mo — 50 monitors, 10-minute checks, 30,000 checks $5/mo — 25 watches and 25 monitors, 5-minute checks
Fastest interval at entry paid tier 10 minutes 5 minutes
Very high monitor counts Yes — 150 on Professional, 500+ on Flexi 100 watches and 100 monitors at the top tier
Runs without your machine on Cloud monitors only Always — everything runs server-side
Recorded interactions before a check Yes — macros, on paid plans No
Pages behind a login Yes, via local monitoring in your own browser session No
Element / region picker Yes, with fine-grained selector control Yes — click the part of the page you want watched
Uptime, SSL and domain expiry monitoring Uptime only Yes, all three, on every plan
Hosted status page No Yes, included on every plan
Browser extension Yes, and central to the product No — nothing to install
Fair comparison

What Distill.io does better

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

  • Local monitoring in your own browser, which can reach pages behind a login and content your session already has access to.
  • Recorded macros — click, scroll or fill something in before the check runs.
  • Very high monitor counts on upper tiers, well beyond what MonitoringDaddy offers.
  • Fine-grained selector control and a mature browser extension for people who enjoy configuring things precisely.
  • Mobile apps and cross-device sync.

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 keep discovering that a monitor did not run because your laptop was asleep.
  • You have hit the email alert cap and missed something as a result.
  • You want faster than six-hour checks without moving to a paid tier.
  • You would rather configure a watch in three clicks than tune selectors and macros.

Stay on Distill.io if…

  • You monitor pages that require a logged-in session.
  • You need a macro to run before the page is captured.
  • You genuinely run hundreds of monitors.
  • The browser extension workflow is what you like about it.
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. There is no free plan; every tier can be cancelled at any time.

PlanMonitorsFastest intervalAlert channelsAPIPrice
Starter25Every 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, step by step

Moving from Distill.io without a gap in coverage

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

1. List what you actually monitor

Export or write down every active check in Distill.io: the URL, how often it runs, what counts as a failure and who gets alerted. Most teams find checks nobody needs any more — this is the moment to drop them.

2. Re-create the important ones first

Open Page watches → New watch, paste the page and click the part you watched in Distill.io. For prices or stock, set Tell me about to Any change — the default ignores standalone numbers and small edits.

Watch picker with a pricing table selected on a live pagePicking the region to watch.

Then click + under Alert channels and add the same destinations your team watches today — email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Flock, Telegram or a webhook.

Alert channel options: Email, Webhook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Flock and TelegramAlert channels available on every monitor.

3. Run both tools in parallel for a week

Each change shows a summary, before-and-after renders and the words that changed — compare it with what Distill.io sent for the same page.

Change view with before and after renders and highlighted changesA detected change, before and after.

4. Point your status page and cancel

Move any public status page across, confirm a full week of clean overlap, then cancel Distill.io. Keep the export from step 1 — it is the easiest way to prove nothing was left behind.

Start monitoring Read the setup guide
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 Distill.io is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.

Details about Distill.io 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
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

Distill.io alternative: your questions answered

What is the difference between Distill's local and cloud monitors?

Cloud monitors run on Distill's servers around the clock. Local monitors run inside the browser extension on your own device and only while that device is awake and the browser is open. On the free plan 5 of the 25 advertised monitors are cloud monitors. Everything in MonitoringDaddy runs server-side, so there is no local-versus-cloud distinction to keep track of.

Are alerts limited here?

No. Distill's free plan caps email alerts at 30 a month and push notifications at 100; Starter raises email to 2,000 a month. MonitoringDaddy does not cap the number of alerts sent. What plans limit is how many separate destinations one watch can notify — one address on free, three on paid plans, plus webhook channels.

How many checks do I get?

There is no check allowance. Each plan gives page watches and a fastest interval, and the schedule runs. Distill publishes a monthly check quota per plan — 1,000 on free, 30,000 on Starter, 100,000 on Professional — which is worth comparing against how often you actually want your pages checked.

Can it watch pages behind a login?

No, and this is a genuine gap. Distill can, because local monitors run inside your own logged-in browser. MonitoringDaddy fetches pages as an anonymous visitor, so anything requiring a session is out of reach today.

Do I need to install anything?

No. There is no extension and no desktop agent — you add a URL in the browser and the server does the rest. That is the trade: less control than Distill's extension offers, and nothing to install, update or keep running.

What happens when a page changes?

The version is recorded with a word-level diff, full-page before and after screenshots are captured, and you are emailed a plain-English summary of what changed with the images inline. Every alert carries a one-click pause link that works without signing in.

Can I watch just part of a page?

Yes. The page loads in a picker and you click the part you care about — a price, a table, a status line. The rest of the page is then ignored entirely, which is the most effective way to stop false alerts.

Does it monitor uptime too?

Yes. A page watch and an uptime monitor are the same underlying check here, so a watched page is also checked for outages, and SSL and domain expiry monitoring are included on every plan.

Is there an API?

Yes, on paid plans, for creating and managing monitors programmatically. See the API reference.

How do I move my monitors across?

Export or list your Distill watchlist, then add the URLs here — there is a bulk import for up to 100 URLs at a time, and an API on paid plans if you would rather script it.

Keep reading

Compare other monitoring tools

Last updated August 6, 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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