Spot Downtime

UptimeRobot alternatives: what to use now the free plan is personal-only

UptimeRobot's free plan no longer allows commercial use and paid plans got pricier in 2025. How the main alternatives compare, and how to switch in 15 minutes.

· 5 min read · By the Spot Downtime team

For years UptimeRobot was the default answer to “how do I get alerted when my site goes down?”: 50 free monitors, no questions asked. Two changes in 2025 sent a lot of people looking for alternatives. The free plan became personal, non-commercial use only, and paid plans were repriced: the entry Solo plan is now $13 a month for 10 monitors, and Team is $46 a month.

If you monitor a business on the free plan, you're now outside its terms. Here's what to consider, and how the main alternatives compare. Prices are monthly-billed list prices as of October 2026.

UptimeRobot vs Spot Downtime

UptimeRobotSpot Downtime
Free plan50 monitors, 5 min checks20 monitors, 5 min checks
Commercial use on freeNoYes
Team seats on freeNone3
Entry paid planSolo: $13/mo, 10 monitors, 1 minStarter: $7/mo, 50 monitors, 1 min
Team planTeam: $46/mo, 100 monitors, 30 s, 3 seatsPro: $19/mo, 150 monitors, 30 s, 15 seats
Cron job (heartbeat) monitoringYesYes, from Starter
Status pages1 free, custom domain on paid1 free, custom domain from Starter
Check locationsMultipleOne, with a 2-second confirmation re-check
SMS / voice alertsCredits included on paid plansNot built in; via PagerDuty, Pushover or ntfy

Choose UptimeRobot if your project is genuinely personal and you need more than 20 monitors for free, or if you need multi-location checks and SMS credits included. Choose Spot Downtime if you're a business that wants to stay on a free plan legitimately, or a small team that wants 1-minute checks without paying $46 a month for seats.

Other UptimeRobot alternatives

Better Stack

Strong on-call scheduling, phone and SMS alerts, and incident management. Free for 10 monitors; paid plans are per responder ($34 a month each, billed monthly), so a team of five pays around $170 a month. Worth it if you run a real on-call rotation. More on Better Stack.

StatusCake

Free for 10 monitors at 5-minute checks; Superior is $24.49 a month for 100 monitors at 1 minute. Adds page speed and domain monitoring. More on StatusCake.

Uptime Kuma

Free and open source, self-hosted. No monitor limits, but you run the server, handle updates, and need something else to tell you when the monitoring server itself is down. Self-hosted vs hosted.

Pingdom

No free plan; $18 a month for 10 uptime checks. Its strength is transaction checks and real-user monitoring rather than price. More on Pingdom.

Switching takes about 15 minutes

  1. List your UptimeRobot monitors: URL, type, interval and any keyword checks.
  2. Create the same monitors in the new tool. Keep both running side by side for a few days.
  3. Add your alert channels (Slack, Teams, Discord, email, PagerDuty…) and send a test from each.
  4. Recreate your status page, then update the link in your app, docs and email footers.
  5. Pause UptimeRobot once you've seen the new tool catch an incident or two.

Check what you're actually monitoring

Migration is a good moment to review. Add a keyword check to pages that can fail “softly” with a 200, an API assertion to endpoints that return JSON, and a heartbeat to the cron jobs nobody watches.
Spot Downtime pricingFree for 20 monitors with commercial use allowed. Starter is $7 a month.

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