updown.io is the cheapest credible uptime monitoring there is, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — one credit per check, no plans, no commitment. The question is what happens to the certificate, the domain, the pricing page and the nightly backup, because none of those are uptime checks.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is MonitoringDaddy a real updown.io alternative?
Only if you want more than availability. For pure uptime they are cheaper and faster — 15-second intervals against our 60-second floor, at a fraction of the cost. We become the better choice when certificates, domains, page content and scheduled jobs also need watching, because those come from the same $5 allowance rather than not existing.
Credits buy checks. They do not buy a warning that your certificate expires in nine days, which is the outage you could most easily have avoided.
Pay-as-you-go means monitoring stops when the credits do. A fixed plan cannot quietly lapse.
Uptime in one tool, certificates in another, page changes in a third. The tools multiply faster than the insight.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the updown.io column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | updown.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime monitoring | Yes — its entire purpose | Yes |
| Cost for plain uptime | From about €1.83/mo for 10 sites | $5/mo for 25 monitors |
| Fastest check interval | 15 seconds | 60 seconds on Pro, 5 minutes on entry |
| Pricing model | Credits — 1 credit per check | Fixed monthly, nothing metered |
| Certificate expiry alerts | No expiry alerting worth relying on | Yes — standalone type, 1 to 60 day window |
| Domain expiry monitoring | No | Yes — 1 to 180 day window |
| Page content change detection | No | Yes — region selection, ignore rules, screenshots |
| Cron heartbeat monitoring | No | Yes |
| Status pages | Yes, included | Yes — 1 to 50 depending on plan |
| SMS alerts | Metered — 7,500 credits each | Included on suitable plans |
| Free option | Free starting credits | No free plan |
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 updown.io 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 updown.io is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about updown.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.
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.
For uptime alone, considerably — ten sites checked every two minutes starts around €1.83 a month against our $5. The comparison changes once certificates, domains, page changes or heartbeats are also needed, because those are not available there at any price.
No. Their floor is 15 seconds; ours is 60 seconds on the Pro plan and five minutes on the entry plan. If seconds matter on a payment endpoint, that is a real advantage for them.
No. A monitor checks at its interval as often as you like and nothing is deducted from anything. Changing an interval does not change the bill.
Not as a proper expiry alerting feature with a configurable warning window. If certificate renewals need chasing, that is the gap.
An uptime check, a certificate, a domain expiry watch, a page content watch or a cron heartbeat. They all come from the same count, so 25 monitors on the $5 plan can be any mix.
No. updown.io gives new accounts free starting credits, which is a genuine pilot. We start at $5 a month.
Monitoring stops. That is the structural risk of pay-as-you-go, and the main argument for a fixed plan if the monitoring matters.
Yes, from one on the entry plan up to 50 on Pro. updown.io includes them too.
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 updown.io for a week. Free plan, no credit card.