updown.io has no tiers, no seats and no plan to outgrow. You buy credits, each check spends one, and you choose how often to check — anywhere from every 15 seconds to once an hour. Ten sites checked every two minutes costs a couple of euros a month. It is the cheapest credible monitoring available, and it is cheap because it does exactly one thing.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is updown.io worth it?
For plain availability monitoring it is outstanding value and nothing else comes close on price. €5 buys 200,000 credits, and at one credit per check that covers a small estate for months. The catch is not quality but scope: there is no certificate expiry alerting worth the name, no domain monitoring, no content change detection and no heartbeats. You are buying uptime checks, priced honestly, and nothing else.
updown.io is a pay-as-you-go uptime monitor. There are no subscription tiers. You top up a credit balance, and every check of every URL spends exactly one credit, so your cost is simply the number of targets multiplied by how often you check them.
Intervals run from 15 seconds to one hour. Because cost scales directly with frequency, you can make one critical endpoint very sensitive and leave everything else on a relaxed schedule, without renegotiating anything.
New accounts start with a pool of free credits, which means a genuine pilot rather than a limited trial. SMS alerts cost 7,500 credits, roughly €0.10 each — metered like everything else.
One job, priced more honestly than anyone else in the category.
One credit per check, no monthly commitment and no plan to sit inside. Ten sites every two minutes starts around €1.83 a month.
Faster than most tools offer at any price, and you pay for the frequency you actually choose rather than a tier that bundles it.
Cost equals targets times frequency. You can forecast a year of monitoring on the back of an envelope, which almost no competitor allows.
New accounts get a pool of credits, so a real pilot costs nothing and does not expire on a trial clock.
Public status pages come with the service rather than sitting behind a higher tier.
No seats, no upsells, no plan comparison table. For a lot of people this is the actual feature.
Credits, bought in packs, spent one per check.
| Item | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 200,000 credits | €5 | One credit per check |
| 10,000,000 credits | €100 | Bulk rate |
| 10 sites every 2 minutes | From €1.83/mo | Up to about €5.49/mo depending on configuration |
| SMS alert | 7,500 credits | About €0.10 each |
| New accounts | Free credits | A real pilot, not a time-limited trial |
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 pure uptime cost, updown.io beats us and it is not close. Ten sites checked every two minutes for under €2 a month is less than half our entry plan, and we would not argue a customer out of that if availability is genuinely all they need.
The difference is what else is expiring. A certificate runs out, a domain lapses, a pricing page changes, a nightly backup silently stops — updown.io covers none of those. Our $5 plan covers 25 monitors that can be any of them, with certificate warning windows from 1 to 60 days, domain expiry from 1 to 180, page content diffing and cron heartbeats.
They also check faster than we do. Their floor is 15 seconds; ours is 60 seconds on Pro and five minutes on the entry plan. For a payment endpoint where seconds matter, that is a real advantage.
The honest split: availability, cheaply, for someone who will handle everything else themselves — theirs. One account that notices all the different ways a site quietly stops being fine — 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.
You buy credits and each check spends one. A pack of 200,000 credits costs €5 and 10 million costs €100. Cost is simply targets multiplied by check frequency, with no monthly commitment.
Ten websites checked every two minutes starts from around €1.83 a month, rising to about €5.49 depending on configuration. For plain uptime monitoring nothing mainstream is cheaper.
From every 15 seconds up to once an hour. Because you pay per check, a 15-second interval costs four times what a one-minute interval costs for the same target.
Not as a proper expiry alerting feature with a configurable warning window. If certificate renewals are something you need chased, this is not the tool for it.
No. Domain registration lapses are outside what it covers.
Yes, new accounts start with a pool of them, so you can run a genuine pilot without paying and without a trial deadline.
Yes, 7,500 credits each, roughly €0.10. Consistent with the rest of the model — everything is metered.
For uptime alone they are cheaper and they check faster, down to 15 seconds. We cover certificates, domains, page content changes and heartbeats from the same $5 allowance, none of which they do.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
updown.io is cheaper for availability. We also watch certificates, domains, page content and scheduled jobs from $5 a month.