Fifty monitors for nothing is the most generous free offer in uptime monitoring, and it is why UptimeRobot has millions of users. Two details decide whether it applies to you: since October 2024 that free plan is licensed for personal, non-commercial use only, and the cheapest paid plan gives you fewer monitors than the free one does.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is UptimeRobot worth it?
On the free plan, for a personal project, it is unbeatable and nothing here should suggest otherwise. On the paid plans the value proposition changes sharply: Solo is $13 a month for 10 monitors, which is a fifth of what you get free, because what you are buying is the 60-second interval and the commercial licence rather than capacity. Judge it as two different products, because that is what it is.
UptimeRobot checks whether your sites, APIs and servers respond, and tells you when they stop. It covers HTTP, keyword, port, ping, DNS, SSL and API checks, with alerts by email, Slack, webhook and more, plus public status pages.
Its reputation was built on the free plan: 50 monitors at five-minute intervals, which for most of its history was simply more than anyone else gave away. That is still true.
What changed in October 2024 is the licence. The free plan is now restricted to personal, non-commercial use. If the site earns money, belongs to a client, or is a business at all, you are expected to be on a paid plan — and a great many long-standing free users are, technically, no longer eligible.
The fundamentals, at a scale nobody else gives away.
Five-minute checks across HTTP, keyword, port, ping, DNS, SSL and API monitor types. For a personal estate this is genuinely all most people need.
Certificate and domain expiry are monitor types rather than a paid add-on, including on the free plan.
One on free, three on Solo, a hundred on Team. Enough to communicate an incident without building anything.
Email, Slack, webhooks, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty and more, with SMS and voice sold separately as credits.
60 seconds on Solo and above, 30 seconds on Team. The interval is the main thing the money buys.
Years of operation and millions of users. It is boring in the way infrastructure should be.
Four self-serve tiers as of August 2026. Read the monitor counts carefully.
| Plan | Price | Monitors | Interval and notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 5-minute checks, 1 status page. Personal, non-commercial use only |
| Solo | $13/mo | 10 | $12 annually. 60-second checks, 3 status pages, 3 seats |
| Team | $46/mo | 100 | $39 annually. 30-second checks, 100 status pages, 5 seats |
| Scale | $98/mo | 200 | $83 annually |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Quoted |
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.
For a personal project, UptimeRobot free wins and there is no argument to make. Fifty monitors for nothing beats our $5 entry plan on every measure that matters to a hobbyist, and we would tell a friend to use it.
The comparison changes completely once the site is commercial, because the free plan is not licensed for that. Against Solo at $13 for 10 monitors, our Starter is $5 for 25 and our Growth is $19 for 50 — and a monitor with us can be an uptime check, a certificate, a domain, a page content watch or a cron heartbeat, where theirs is an uptime check with certificate and domain types alongside.
Two things they do that we do not: 30-second checks on Team, against our 60-second floor on Pro, and 100 status pages where we offer up to 50. One thing we do that they do not at all: page content change detection, which is a different question from whether the site responds.
The honest split: personal and free — theirs. Commercial, mid-sized, and wanting content changes watched too — 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.
Yes, at five-minute intervals, but since October 2024 the free plan is licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. Monitoring a business or client site on it is outside the terms.
Because the paid tiers sell speed and licensing rather than capacity. Solo at $13 a month covers 10 monitors at 60-second checks; the free plan covers 50 at five minutes. If you need many monitors commercially, Team at $46 is the realistic entry point.
Free at $0, Solo at $13 a month ($12 annually), Team at $46 ($39 annually) and Scale at $98 ($83 annually) for 200 monitors. Enterprise is quoted. Verify on their pricing page before subscribing.
Yes, as a monitor type, on all plans including free. Domain expiry is covered too.
Only through keyword monitors, which check whether a specific string is present or absent. That is not the same as diffing a page and telling you what changed.
No. SMS and voice are sold as credits separately from the plan on every tier, so heavy alerting carries a cost beyond the subscription.
For personal projects, absolutely — it remains the best free offer available. For anything commercial, the licence means you should be paying, and at that point the comparison is against every other paid tool.
Free and personal, theirs. Commercially, our $5 plan covers 25 monitors and our $19 plan covers 50, against Solo at $13 for 10 — and ours can be uptime, certificates, domains, page changes or heartbeats. They check faster at 30 seconds; we do content change detection and they do not.
Last updated May 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
25 monitors of any type — uptime, SSL, domain, page changes, heartbeats — checked every five minutes.