The UptimeRobot alternative that also watches your security
UptimeRobot is the biggest name in uptime monitoring, and for plenty of people it's still the right tool.
This page is the honest version of the comparison: where UptimeRobot genuinely beats us, where we beat it, and the fine print — like the December 2024 terms change that made its free plan non-commercial — that sends people here in the first place.
- You want SMS or voice-call alerts, or a native mobile app.
- You need keyword or website-change monitoring today.
- You monitor a hobby project and 50 free non-commercial monitors is plenty.
- A 14-year track record matters more to you than anything on a feature list.
- Your project makes money — our free tier allows commercial use, theirs doesn't.
- You want security watched too: headers, DNS, email spoofing, leaked secrets, CVEs.
- You've been burned by single-region false alarms — we confirm from a second region first.
- You run on Stripe, cron jobs, or Supabase and want those watched, not just the homepage.
Side by side
Red marks on our side are real gaps, not modesty theater.
UptimeRobot facts come from their public pricing page, terms, and roadmap. Our facts render from the same plan config as our pricing page, so they can't drift.
| facts checked July 17, 2026 | UptimeRobot | Tell Me When Down |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 50 monitors at 5-minute checks — but non-commercial use only, since December 2024 | 1 app with every feature, commercial use welcome |
| Paid pricing | From $8/mo (Solo), priced per monitor | $15/mo for 10 apps, up to $49/mo for 100 — flat, per app |
| Down confirmation | Re-checks from the same region; multi-location verification still listed as in progress on their roadmap | A second region must confirm before we alert — today |
| Security scanning | None — SSL expiry only | Headers, DNS, email spoofing, exposed secrets, dependency CVEs — graded A–F with copy-paste fixes |
| Stripe webhook monitoring | No | Yes — know when your payment events stop flowing |
| Cron heartbeats | Yes | Yes — and ours learn your job's rhythm instead of making you declare it |
| Alert channels | Email, Slack, Telegram, webhooks and more; SMS and voice cost extra credits | Email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, webhooks — every channel on every plan, including free. No SMS or voice |
| Status pages | Yes — one free public status page | Yes — one per app, free on every plan (on our domain; custom domains later) |
| Keyword monitoring | Yes | Not yet |
| Mobile app & public API | Both | Neither yet — alerts reach your phone via Telegram or Slack |
| Plain-English alerts | Standard monitoring notifications | Every alert and finding explains itself, with a fix you can paste — or hand to your AI assistant |
| Track record | Running since 2010, 3.3M+ users | Launched 2026, built and run by one founder |
What UptimeRobot does better
SMS and voice-call alerts, if email-plus-chat isn't enough for you. A native mobile app and a public API.
Keyword monitoring and website-change detection, which we don't have yet.
And scale: 3.3 million users and fourteen years of operation buy a kind of trust a 2026 product can't claim.
If any of those is your dealbreaker, use UptimeRobot — it's a good tool and we'd rather you pick it than be disappointed here.
What you get here that UptimeRobot doesn't have
A second product, essentially. Every app you monitor also gets a scheduled security scan — security headers, DNS hygiene, SPF/DMARC email-spoofing protection, exposed secrets and .env probes, dependency CVEs read from your repo.
Every finding is graded A to F and explained in plain English, with a copy-paste fix. Each one also ships with a prompt you can paste into Cursor or Claude and have the fix written for you.
The monitoring goes deeper than a homepage ping too: cron heartbeats that learn your job's rhythm, and Stripe webhook monitoring — if your payment events stop flowing, you find out from us, not from a customer email a week later.
Plus Supabase pause and Render spin-down awareness, domain expiry, a free public status page per app, and alerts on email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, or any webhook — on every plan.
The free-tier fine print
UptimeRobot's free plan is generous on numbers — 50 monitors — but since December 2024 its terms restrict it to non-commercial use.
If your site sells anything, runs ads, or belongs to a client, you're expected to pay.
Our free tier is 1 app instead of 50 monitors, but it includes every feature we have and explicitly welcomes commercial projects. One funded app beats fifty monitors you're not allowed to point at your business.
Run it next to UptimeRobot and see.
Nothing to migrate — paste a URL and uptime checks, SSL watching, and your first security scan start in about a minute. Keep both running for a week, then keep whichever earns it.
UptimeRobot vs Tell Me When Down, answered
Can I use UptimeRobot's free plan for my business?
Not anymore. In December 2024 UptimeRobot changed its terms so the free plan covers non-commercial projects only.
A business site, a client site, or anything that earns money needs a paid plan. That change is what sends most people looking for alternatives.
Tell Me When Down's free tier explicitly allows commercial use: one app, every feature, no card.
Why does UptimeRobot report my site down when it isn't?
UptimeRobot verifies a failed check by re-checking from the same region. A routing hiccup between that region and your server can read as downtime.
Multi-location verification has been a top-requested feature on their roadmap.
Tell Me When Down requires a second, different region to confirm the failure before any alert goes out — on every plan, including free.
Is Tell Me When Down a good UptimeRobot alternative?
It depends on what you need. If you want SMS alerts, a native mobile app, or a public API today, UptimeRobot is genuinely the better pick — we don't have those yet.
If you're an indie dev who wants uptime monitoring plus the security checks no uptime tool does (headers, DNS, email spoofing, leaked secrets, dependency CVEs), that's exactly what we built.
And our free tier is allowed on commercial projects, which theirs no longer is.
Does UptimeRobot check my site's security?
Beyond SSL certificate expiry, no — UptimeRobot is an availability tool.
Tell Me When Down runs a scheduled security scan alongside uptime checks: security headers, DNS and email-spoofing protection (SPF/DMARC), exposed secrets and .env files, dependency CVEs from your repo, cookie flags, and mixed content.
Everything is graded A to F, and each finding comes with a copy-paste fix or a prompt you can hand to your AI assistant.
How hard is it to switch from UptimeRobot?
There's nothing to migrate — monitoring starts from a URL.
Paste your site's address, and uptime checks, SSL and domain expiry watching, and the first security scan start within a minute.
Most people run both tools side by side for a week or two, then decide. The free tier makes that comparison cost nothing.
What does Tell Me When Down cost compared to UptimeRobot?
UptimeRobot starts at $8/mo and prices per monitor — one app watching uptime, SSL, and a keyword can eat several monitor slots.
Tell Me When Down is flat per app: free for 1 app, $15/mo for up to 10 apps.
Every app includes uptime, SSL and domain expiry, security scanning, heartbeats, a status page, and Stripe webhook monitoring. (Prices checked July 17, 2026.)
Comparing others too? See how we stack up against Better Stack and Pingdom, or read the full indie-hacker uptime monitoring roundup.
Related reading
Other free checks
uptimerobot 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.