Tell Me When Down
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compare · facts checked July 17, 2026

The Pingdom alternative for everyone Pingdom left behind

Pingdom helped invent this category, and its probe network and transaction checks are still genuinely good.

But the free tier died in 2021, the pricing stacks up fast, and the product now sits quietly inside a private-equity-owned portfolio.

If you're a small team or a solo dev who just wants to know your sites are up — and increasingly, that they're secure — here's the honest comparison.

stay with Pingdom if…
  • You need scripted transaction checks — log in, add to cart, pay — not just endpoint checks.
  • You want real user monitoring and page-speed analytics in the same tool.
  • Your company wants a vendor with two decades of enterprise history.
  • You need SMS alerts or a native mobile app.
Tell Me When Down

Uptime and security monitoring for people who'd rather ship than babysit servers. We watch so you can sleep.

product
How it worksWhat we checkPricingDocsFAQ
free toolsWebsite security scanSupabase pause checkRender sleep checkMixed content checkerSecurity headers checkCookie security checkSSL expiry check
pick tell me when down if…
  • You want a real free tier again — one app, every feature, commercial use allowed.
  • You want one flat bill, not three metered products that stack.
  • You want security watched too: headers, DNS, spoofing, leaked secrets, CVEs.
  • You run on Stripe or cron jobs and want those watched, in plain English.

Side by side

Red marks on our side are real gaps, not modesty theater.

Pingdom facts come from their public pricing and docs. Our facts render from the same plan config as our pricing page, so they can't drift.

facts checked July 17, 2026PingdomTell Me When Down
Free tierNone — removed in 2021; trial only1 app with every feature, commercial use welcome, no card
Paid pricingAdvertised from ~$15/mo billed annually; uptime, synthetics, and RUM are separate meters, so real spend commonly lands several times higherFlat per app: $15/mo for 10 apps, up to $49/mo for 100. Every feature on every plan
Security scanningNone — SSL expiry onlyHeaders, DNS, email spoofing, exposed secrets, dependency CVEs — graded A–F with copy-paste fixes
Browser / transaction checksYes — scripted user-journey checksNo — we check endpoints, not scripted flows
Real user monitoring & page speedYesNo — outside-in monitoring only
Stripe webhook monitoringNoYes
Cron heartbeatsNoYes — and they learn your job's rhythm automatically
Probe networkLarge, long-established global probe fleet3 regions — a second region must confirm before we alert
Alert channelsEmail, SMS, push via mobile app, integrationsEmail, Slack, Discord, Telegram, webhooks on every plan. No SMS or native app
Plain-English alertsStandard enterprise monitoring notificationsEvery alert and finding explains itself, with a fix you can paste — or hand to your AI assistant
Track recordMonitoring since the mid-2000s; owned by SolarWinds, private-equity owned since April 2025Launched 2026, built and run by one founder

What Pingdom does better

Synthetic transaction monitoring is the big one — scripted browser journeys that catch "the site is up but checkout is broken", which plain endpoint checks like ours can't see.

Real user monitoring and page-speed analysis. A probe network built over nearly twenty years.

And the plain fact of longevity: Pingdom has been monitoring the web since before some of our users could type.

If those capabilities are on your must-have list, stay.

What you get here that Pingdom doesn't have

The security half of the job. Every monitored app gets a scheduled scan — security headers, DNS hygiene, SPF/DMARC email-spoofing protection, exposed secrets and .env probes, dependency CVEs from your repo.

Each finding is graded A to F with a plain-English explanation and a copy-paste fix, or a prompt you can hand to Cursor or Claude.

Plus the deep checks no legacy tool bothered with: cron heartbeats that learn your schedule, Stripe webhook monitoring, Supabase pause and Render spin-down awareness, and domain expiry.

And the small-team basics Pingdom walked away from: a free tier that allows commercial use, a public status page per app, chat-native alerts on every plan, and a price you can hold in your head.

Miss having a free monitoring tier? It's back.

Paste a URL and uptime checks, SSL and domain expiry watching, and your first security scan start in about a minute. No card, no trial clock.

Start monitoring freefree plan · no card · commercial use welcome

Pingdom vs Tell Me When Down, answered

Does Pingdom have a free plan?

No. Pingdom removed its free tier in 2021 — today there's only a time-limited trial before paid plans start.

That single change pushed a generation of hobby and indie users to look elsewhere.

Tell Me When Down keeps a real free tier: one app, every feature, commercial use explicitly allowed.

Is Pingdom still being actively developed?

Pingdom works, and its probe network and uptime pedigree are real.

But it's one legacy brand inside the SolarWinds portfolio, which itself went private-equity owned in April 2025. The pace of new features has been slow for years — most user complaints center on pricing rather than missing capability.

If you want a tool that's visibly evolving, that's worth weighing.

Why is Pingdom so expensive for small sites?

Pingdom advertises from about $15/mo billed annually. But uptime checks, synthetic transaction checks, and real user monitoring are separately metered products — a small production setup easily lands several times the sticker price per year.

Tell Me When Down is flat per app with everything included: ten apps on the Indie plan costs $15/mo, full stop. (Prices checked July 17, 2026.)

What does Pingdom do better than Tell Me When Down?

Three real things: scripted browser/transaction checks (log in, add to cart, check out — we don't do that), real user monitoring with page-speed analytics, and nearly two decades of enterprise track record with a very large probe network.

If those are your requirements, Pingdom or a synthetics-first tool like Checkly is the right call.

Is Tell Me When Down a good Pingdom alternative for small teams?

If you're using Pingdom for what most small teams use it for — uptime checks, SSL expiry, and alerting — then yes.

You also gain things Pingdom doesn't do at all: security scanning (headers, DNS, email spoofing, leaked secrets, dependency CVEs), cron heartbeat monitoring, public status pages, and Stripe webhook monitoring.

If you rely on transaction checks or RUM, we're not a replacement.

Comparing others too? See how we stack up against UptimeRobot and Better Stack, or read the full indie-hacker uptime monitoring roundup.

pingdom 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.

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