DomainMOD is open-source domain portfolio management — registrars, renewal costs, SSL certificates and DNS, all self-hosted and free. If you manage hundreds of domains as a business function, it is genuinely useful. If you just want to be told before one lapses, it is a lot of machinery.
Free plan forever · No credit card · Set up in under a minute
Is MonitoringDaddy a real DomainMOD alternative?
For being warned before a domain expires, yes, with nothing to install and the warning attached to a monitor you already need. DomainMOD is the better tool if you manage a large portfolio and need registrar accounts, renewal costs and ownership tracked as a discipline.
PHP, a database, updates and backups — for what many people need to be a reminder before a renewal date.
A self-hosted tool stops warning you at exactly the moment your infrastructure has a problem.
Cost tracking and registrar inventory are useful. A lapsed domain is an outage.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the DomainMOD column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | DomainMOD | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Domain expiry alerts | Yes | Yes — attached to any monitor, no extra allowance |
| Self-hosted and free | Yes — open source | No — hosted only |
| Registrar account tracking | Yes — accounts, costs, renewal pricing | No |
| Domain portfolio management | Yes — its purpose | No — we warn on expiry |
| DNS record tracking | Yes | No |
| Uptime monitoring | No | Yes, on every plan |
| SSL expiry warnings | Yes | Yes, attached to a monitor |
| Website change detection | No | Yes, with word-level diffs |
| Maintenance burden | Yours — server, updates, backups | None |
| Entry price | Free, plus hosting and your time | $5/mo for 25 monitors with domain and SSL warnings |
Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.
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.
Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.
HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.
A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.
Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.
Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.
Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.
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.
Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.
| Plan | Monitors | Fastest interval | Alert channels | API | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Every 30 minutes | — | $0 | |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
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.
List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.
Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.
Keep DomainMOD live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.
Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.
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 DomainMOD is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about DomainMOD 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.
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.
It attaches to a monitor. You add a site, turn on domain expiry warnings, and we tell you well before the registration lapses — at no additional allowance.
Not really. Our domain warning attaches to a monitor for a site. A parked domain with nothing to monitor is a case DomainMOD handles and we do not.
It is a standard PHP application with a database. Straightforward if you already host such things, and an ongoing responsibility either way.
No. We warn you before expiry. Registrar accounts, pricing and ownership records are portfolio management and outside what we do.
Because it is a total outage that is entirely predictable. Unlike a crash, you can see it coming weeks ahead — which makes missing it particularly painful.
No. We watch the registration expiring, not the records. A changed A record is not something we report.
One per monitor: 25 on the $5 plan, 50 on Growth, 100 on Pro — each also covering uptime and certificate expiry.
Yes — DomainMOD as the portfolio record, and hosted monitoring so the expiry warning does not depend on your own server being up.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Set up a monitor on your most important URL and run it alongside DomainMOD for a week. Free plan, no credit card.