Upptime is an ingenious idea: uptime monitoring and a status page built entirely from a GitHub repository, using Actions as the scheduler and Issues as the incident log. It is free, transparent and genuinely clever. It is also bound by what GitHub Actions can do.
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Is MonitoringDaddy a real Upptime alternative?
For anyone who wants checks more often than every five minutes, alerts that do not depend on Actions minutes, or content and certificate monitoring, yes. Upptime is excellent if you want a free, public, auditable status page and your repository is already on GitHub.
Scheduled workflows are queued rather than guaranteed, so check intervals drift under load.
Everything consumes Actions minutes, and private repositories consume your allowance.
No certificate expiry, no domain expiry, no page-change monitoring, no heartbeats.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the Upptime column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | Upptime | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free on public repositories | $5/mo for 25 monitors, 25 watches, 25 heartbeats |
| Status page | Yes — generated and hosted on GitHub Pages | Yes — 1 on free, 10 on the $5 plan, 50 on Pro |
| Check interval reliability | Approximate — Actions schedules are best-effort | Consistent — 5 minutes on $5, 60s on Pro |
| Fastest interval | Roughly every 5 minutes at best | Every 60 seconds on Pro |
| Fully transparent and auditable | Yes — everything is in the repository | No |
| SSL and domain expiry | No | Yes, attached to a monitor |
| Website change detection | No | Yes, with word-level diffs and images |
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring | No | Yes — up to 100 on Pro |
| Setup | A repository template and some YAML | Paste a URL |
| Maintenance | Yours — workflows, dependencies, Actions quota | None |
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 Upptime 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 Upptime is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about Upptime 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.
Scheduled GitHub Actions are best-effort and queue under load, so a five-minute schedule is a target rather than a guarantee. If detection time matters, that is the main trade-off.
On public repositories, effectively yes. Private repositories consume your Actions minutes.
No. No certificate or domain expiry, no page-change monitoring and no heartbeats — it is uptime and a status page.
Every 60 seconds on Pro, five minutes on the $5 plan, 30 minutes on free — on a consistent schedule rather than a queued one.
Upptime's is clean and free. Ours is included on every plan with branding and a custom domain on paid tiers. Both are hosted away from your own infrastructure.
Yes, though at that point you are running two systems for one job.
Open-source maintainers who want a transparent, free, public status page and can live with approximate intervals.
Consistent fast checks, certificate and domain expiry, page change detection with images, and cron heartbeats.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
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