Best uptime monitoring for indie hackers, honestly
Every roundup like this is written by a vendor, including this one. We make Tell Me When Down, it's listed first, and you should discount our entry accordingly.
What we can promise: every fact here was checked against live pricing pages on July 17, 2026, and every product includes the reason you'd pick it over us. Where a competitor is simply better for your case, it says so in plain text.
Tell Me When Down
yes, this is oursFull disclosure: this is our product, and this whole page exists to earn your attention — judge accordingly.
The pitch is being the only tool here that watches security alongside uptime. Every app gets scheduled scans for headers, DNS, email spoofing, leaked secrets, and dependency CVEs — graded A–F, with fixes you can paste or hand to your AI assistant.
Uptime is confirmed from a second region before alerting, heartbeats learn your cron's rhythm, and every app gets a free public status page.
It's also the only product on this list — or anywhere, as far as we could find — that monitors Stripe webhooks.
Honest gaps: no SMS, no mobile app, no keyword monitoring, and it launched in 2026 — the track record is measured in months.
- You want uptime and security watched by one tool with one flat bill.
- You run on Stripe, cron jobs, or Supabase and want those specifically watched.
- You want alerts in plain English on email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, or webhooks — on every plan.
UptimeRobot
The biggest name in the space, with 3.3M+ users, status pages, a mobile app, and every alert channel you can name.
Two catches. The famous free tier no longer covers anything that makes money.
And down-checks are verified from the same region — which is where its false-positive reputation comes from. Multi-location verification is still on their roadmap.
- You're monitoring a genuinely non-commercial project and want 50 free monitors.
- You need a native mobile app or SMS credits.
Better Stack
The most polished product in monitoring, and honestly one of the best free tiers too.
It's an SRE platform — on-call rotations, escalation, logs, traces, incident management. Exactly what a team wants, and more than a solo founder uses.
The recurring review complaint is bill unpredictability once the meters and seats add up.
- You have a team and need on-call scheduling and escalation.
- You want logs, traces, uptime, and status pages in one platform.
Hyperping
A four-person bootstrapped company from Paris with the strongest pure-uptime free tier on this list. Twenty monitors with chat alerts included is genuinely hard to beat.
Paid plans bring 18 check regions, status pages, and on-call.
No security features, and the paid entry point is on the higher side for one person.
- You want the most generous free uptime tier available today.
- You want lots of check regions and status pages from a small indie company.
OnlineOrNot
Built solo by Max Rozen, and culturally the closest tool to ours — plain-spoken and indie-priced.
It has an API, CLI, and Terraform support the bigger players gate behind team plans, plus uptime, browser checks, and status pages. No security scanning.
If you want to support a solo founder and we don't fit, this is who we'd point you to.
- You want a solo-founder tool with API/CLI/Terraform workflows.
- You value a maintainer who writes honestly about how the product works.
Cronitor
The cron-job specialists — they built crontab.guru, which every developer has used at 2am.
Heartbeat monitoring is excellent, and uptime and RUM are solid.
The pricing is the caveat: per-monitor metering is cheap at five monitors and adds up quickly at fifty.
- Cron jobs and background workers are the main thing you monitor.
- You have a small, stable number of monitors and like paying per unit.
Checkly
Monitoring-as-code with Playwright at the core — you write real browser tests and run them as monitors, versioned in git.
For scripted user journeys it's the best tool on this list.
The metered per-run billing is the standard complaint, and it's aimed at engineers who want to write code, not paste a URL.
- You need scripted browser checks — login flows, checkout — as versioned code.
- You're comfortable trading setup effort for depth.
Uptime Kuma
The open-source favorite (89k GitHub stars, actively maintained) and genuinely good software.
Two structural caveats. It watches your sites from your own server — so if your infrastructure has a bad day, your monitoring does too.
And you're now the person who maintains, updates, and backs up the monitoring tool. Checks run from wherever you host it, one location.
- You self-host on principle and enjoy running your own services.
- You want unlimited monitors for the cost of a small VPS.
The short version
Hobby project, no revenue: UptimeRobot's or Hyperping's free tier. A team with an on-call rotation: Better Stack.
Scripted browser journeys: Checkly. Mostly cron jobs: Cronitor. Self-hosting on principle: Uptime Kuma. A solo-founder tool with Terraform and an API: OnlineOrNot.
And if you want uptime and security — headers, DNS, spoofing, leaked secrets, CVEs, Stripe webhooks — watched by one flat-priced tool in plain English: that's the exact gap we built Tell Me When Down to fill.
The only tool on this list that also scans your security.
Paste a URL and uptime checks, heartbeats, and your first security scan start in about a minute. Free for one app, commercial use welcome, no card.
Picking a monitor, answered
What's the best free uptime monitor for a commercial project?
Watch the terms, not just the numbers. UptimeRobot's 50 free monitors exclude commercial use since December 2024.
Hyperping's free 20 monitors and Better Stack's free 10 monitors both allow commercial use and are excellent pure-uptime choices.
Tell Me When Down's free tier is one app with commercial use welcome — fewer monitors, but it includes security scanning, heartbeats, a status page, and Stripe webhook monitoring that the others don't have at any price.
Is self-hosting Uptime Kuma better than paying for a service?
It's a real option if you enjoy operating services.
The structural problem is correlation: Uptime Kuma checks your sites from your own infrastructure, so a provider outage can take down your monitoring at the exact moment it takes down your site.
Hosted services exist precisely to watch from somewhere else. If you self-host it, put it on a different provider than your apps.
How many check regions do I actually need?
Fewer than the spec sheets suggest.
What matters is that a second location confirms an outage before you get woken up — single-location checking is where false alarms come from.
Whether the tool has 3 regions or 18 matters much less than whether it requires that confirmation. (We check from 3 and require a second region to confirm; some tools with more regions still verify from one.)
Do indie projects really need security monitoring too?
The failure modes that actually hurt indie projects are as often security as uptime: a leaked .env file, a dependency CVE, a missing SPF record that lets someone spoof your domain, an expired cert.
Uptime tools watch none of that.
You can bolt on a separate scanner, or use the one tool on this list that does both — which is our pitch, and also, disclosed bias, our product.
Want the deeper one-on-one comparisons? We've written them for UptimeRobot, Better Stack, and Pingdom.
Related reading
Other free checks
all vendor facts checked against their public pricing and docs on July 17, 2026. our plan facts render from the same config as our pricing page. spot something stale or unfair? email [email protected] and we'll fix it.