“Free uptime monitoring” usually means one of three things: a genuinely free hosted plan with limits, an open-source tool you host yourself, or a trial pretending to be a free plan. This guide covers the first two — seven options that cost $0 indefinitely as of July 2026 — and is explicit about every catch.
All plan details are a July 2026 snapshot, verified against vendor pages. Free tiers change more often than paid ones — double-check before depending on one.
Free plans compared
| Tool | Monitors | Check interval | Status page | Business use OK? | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UptimeRobot | 50 | 5 min | ✅ 1 | ❌ personal only | Non-commercial restriction since Oct 2024 |
| Better Stack | 10 | 3 min | ✅ 1 | ✅ | Low monitor count |
| Uptime Kuma | Unlimited | Configurable | ✅ | ✅ | You host and maintain it |
| Checkly (Hobby) | 10 + 10k API checks/mo | Configurable | — | ✅ | Run-volume caps |
| StatusCake | 10 | 5 min | ✅ | ✅ | Slower checks, limited locations |
| Grafana Cloud | 100k API test runs/mo | Configurable | — | ✅ | Part of a bigger platform — more setup |
| New Relic | Inside 100 GB free ingest | Configurable | — | ✅ | Full-platform complexity for a simple job |
The picks
1. UptimeRobot — most generous, with an asterisk
Fifty monitors at 5-minute intervals plus a basic status page is still the biggest free allocation in hosted uptime monitoring. The asterisk: since October 2024 the free plan is for personal, non-commercial use only. For a side project, homelab or portfolio it remains the default choice; a business should budget ~$7/month for Solo — see our full UptimeRobot vs Pingdom comparison for how it stacks up paid-vs-paid.
2. Better Stack — best free plan for businesses
10 monitors, 3-minute checks, 10 heartbeat monitors and a clean status page, with email and Slack alerts — and no non-commercial restriction. The 60-second checks, phone/SMS alerts and on-call scheduling live in the paid tier (from $29/month), but the free plan is a real product, not bait.
3. Uptime Kuma — best self-hosted
A beautiful, actively maintained open-source monitor you run in a Docker container: unlimited monitors, any check interval, notifications to 90+ services, built-in status pages — free forever. The cost is operational: it monitors from your server, so if that server’s network goes down, so does your monitoring. Run it somewhere independent of the infrastructure you’re watching.
4. Checkly — best free tier for developers
The Hobby tier includes 10 uptime monitors, 10,000 API check runs and 1,000 browser check runs per month — enough to genuinely test APIs and key user flows, not just ping a homepage. Checks are defined as code (Playwright), which developers love and non-developers won’t. It’s also our top pick overall in synthetic monitoring.
5. StatusCake — solid basic freebie
Ten monitors at 5-minute intervals with a status page and no commercial restriction. Fewer check locations and features than Better Stack’s free plan, but a fine second option — and its paid tiers (~$20/month) are competitively priced if you outgrow it (see Pingdom vs StatusCake).
6. Grafana Cloud — free synthetic checks inside a real observability stack
Grafana Cloud’s free tier includes 100,000 synthetic API test executions per month (plus 10k metric series and 50 GB of logs). If you already use — or plan to use — Grafana for metrics and dashboards, you get uptime checking thrown in for nothing. Overkill if all you want is a ping.
7. New Relic Synthetics — free within the 100 GB tier
New Relic’s perpetual free tier (100 GB of monthly ingest, one full user) includes synthetic ping and browser checks. Same logic as Grafana: a great deal if you’ll use the platform, a heavyweight way to ping a URL if you won’t.
Which free option should you pick?
- Personal project → UptimeRobot (50 monitors is unbeatable).
- Small business, $0 budget → Better Stack free, upgrade when you need faster checks.
- Self-hoster → Uptime Kuma on a $4 VPS or spare container.
- Developer / API-heavy → Checkly Hobby.
- Already on Grafana or New Relic → use the checks you’re already entitled to.
The honest limit of every free plan is check interval and alerting: a 5-minute interval can miss a 3-minute outage, and SMS/phone alerts are nearly always paid. When downtime starts costing real money, a $7–29/month paid plan is cheap insurance — our best uptime monitoring tools guide covers the full paid landscape.