Free Uptime Monitoring

What "free" should mean

A lot of "free" monitoring tools are really free trials with a countdown, or plans so limited (one monitor, checks once an hour) they can't actually cover a real site. Genuinely free means the plan doesn't expire, doesn't require a card up front, and covers enough of a real site's core URL to be useful on its own — not just enough to see a demo.

The honest test: could you run this on a real, small production site indefinitely, without ever paying, and still get a meaningful alert if it went down? If the answer is no, it's a trial wearing a "free" label.

What Holter's free plan actually includes

The free plan is 5 monitors, checked every 5 minutes, with no credit card required to start or to keep using it. That's the specific, verifiable claim — not a marketing figure, the actual plan.

Five monitors is a real, working budget for one site's core checks, not a token allowance meant to push you toward paying. It's enough to watch what actually breaks silently on a single domain — it's just not unlimited, and knowing the number up front beats being surprised by it later.

What 5 monitors covers well

A workable free-plan setup for one site: the homepage or main app URL (1), the TLS certificate on that domain (1), the domain's registration expiry (1), and DNS resolution (1) — four monitors that together catch the majority of causes behind real-world outages, since certificates and domains fail silently with no warning until the day they lapse. That leaves one monitor spare for whichever other URL matters most — a login page, a checkout flow, or an API health endpoint.

That's a genuinely useful setup for a single site, not a crippled one. Where 5 starts to feel tight is once you're watching more than one site, or you want several customer-facing paths (checkout, login, an API) each monitored individually rather than sharing one spare slot — that's exactly the point paid tiers raise the monitor cap for.

What the 5-minute interval buys you

A 5-minute check interval bounds detection to a 5-minute worst case between a real outage starting and a monitor catching it — fast enough to catch and respond to most incidents before they turn into a wave of support tickets, without needing any special infrastructure on your end. It's not the fastest interval available, but it's a genuinely useful one, not a throttled-down version meant to feel slow on purpose.

What to expect as you grow

A free plan is meant to cover the basics on one site, not every scenario forever. As a site or team grows, the things that typically push someone past a free tier are wanting checks faster than every 5 minutes, monitoring more sites or endpoints than 5 covers, or needing capabilities built for teams — like several people, or more than one status page — rather than a single person watching a single site. None of that makes the free plan dishonest; it's the natural line between "enough to start" and "enough to run a larger operation."

The point of a genuinely free tier is that you get to find that line yourself, on a real site, before deciding whether crossing it is worth paying for — not have it decided for you by an artificial trial expiry.

How to evaluate any free monitoring tool

Ask three questions before trusting a "free" claim: Does it require a card to start? (If yes, it's a trial.) Does the free tier expire or get throttled after a period of time? (If yes, it's a trial.) Can it actually watch a real site's core URL on a schedule tight enough to matter, or is it too limited to be useful? If a tool passes all three, it's free in the way that word should mean.

A useful gut check: read the pricing page looking specifically for the word "trial." A genuinely free plan is described as free, permanently, with no countdown attached — if the word "trial" shows up anywhere near the free tier, that's the tell.