Free website monitoring: what free plans actually include

"Free" monitoring tools are free in very different ways. One gives you 50 monitors but alerts only by email. Another gives unlimited checks but from a single location that goes quiet every time its provider has a bad night. This is what the small print looks like across the market — including our own free plan, with no varnish.

The four limits every free plan uses

• Monitor count: from 3 (SiteFlux free) to 50 (UptimeRobot free). Enough for a hobby project on the low end, a portfolio on the high end.
• Check frequency: 10 minutes is common on free tiers; 5 minutes on the generous ones. The cost of slow checks is a blind window: at 10-minute intervals your site can be down for 9:59 before you know.
• Check locations: almost every free plan checks from one location. That means every network incident between you and that data center can look like downtime — to you and to your visitors.
• Alert channels: email, always; push sometimes; SMS, phone calls and escalation almost never. An email at 3am is a note to your morning self.

When a free plan is genuinely enough

A personal blog. A portfolio. An internal tool whose users are on the same Slack as you. If nobody loses money when your site is down for an hour, a free monitor plus email alerts covers 90% of the value of monitoring: you find out before a customer tells you.

When free quietly costs you money

The moment your site takes payments, bookings or leads, the calculation changes. A store doing €500 on a good evening loses money faster than any paid plan costs. What you actually need at that point is: checks from multiple locations (so you trust the alert), frequencies of a minute or less, and an alert channel that wakes you up.

That's the gap paid plans fill. Multi-location verification eliminates the false positives that train you to ignore alerts. Faster intervals shrink the blind window. SMS, Telegram, Slack and phone calls turn a notification into an incident response.

SiteFlux's own free plan, honestly

3 monitors, checked every 10 minutes from 1 location, email alerts, SSL expiry monitoring, one status page, 14 days of history. We built it to be enough for a first project — and we also give every new account 7 days of paid features without a credit card, so you can feel the difference between 1 location and 3 before deciding. Paid plans start at €2.99/month for 20 monitors on 2 locations.

A practical path

• Start on any free plan today — the best monitor is the one you actually set up.
• Put your most valuable URL first, and add a keyword check to it, not just a 200.
• The first time a false positive (or a missed real outage) costs you something, move that URL to a paid plan with multi-location checks.
• Keep the free monitors for the things that can wait; pay only for the things that can't.

If you want to feel the difference, start the 7-day trial — or keep reading: how much downtime actually costs is the article that usually convinces people.