UptimeRobot
Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent.
Uptime checks from outside your infrastructure: it pings your sites on an interval and tells you when one stops answering, with a status page included.
Build uptime checks, and host them away from what they watch. THE ONE RULE - The checker cannot live on the infrastructure it monitors. Use a different provider — a free tier somewhere else is fine STACK - A tiny worker with a cron trigger, SQLite or a hosted key-value store CHECKS - HTTP with a timeout, an expected status and an optional body match - Every check writes a row whether or not anything changed, so "stable" and "we stopped looking" remain different answers - Two consecutive failures before declaring down; a single failure is usually a blip ALERTING - Webhook to chat first, email second, both retried - One alert per incident, and one when it recovers. Never one per check WATCHING THE WATCHER - A daily heartbeat message proving the checker itself ran - Without it, a dead monitor looks exactly like everything being fine STATUS PAGE - Static, rebuilt on state change, served from a third place - Ninety days of uptime computed from the check rows Include the worker, the schema and the heartbeat.
What you lose
- Checks running somewhere entirely separate from your own hosting, which is the only place a monitor is worth anything
- Several check locations, so a regional network problem is distinguishable from an outage
- Alerting by phone and chat with escalation on the paid tiers
If you would rather not build
- OpenStatus, monitoring plus a status page
- A cron job with curl, which genuinely works
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Uptime Kuma
$0Self-hosted uptime monitoring with a status page and many alert channels.
louislam/uptime-kumafree · open source
Gatus
$0Health checks defined in YAML, one small binary, with conditions and alerts.
TwiN/gatusfree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
87/100
Verdict yes at 87. An HTTP request on a timer. The heartbeat and the hosting rule are the two things that make a home-made monitor trustworthy.
History
tracked since 10 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Nothing recorded yet. This chart fills in once the page has visitors, votes or prompt copies — it will not draw a flat line to look busy.
Questions about UptimeRobot
answered from the record above
Is UptimeRobot free?
No — the plan we track is $7 a month. Solo at around $7/month billed monthly; a free tier covers 50 monitors at five-minute intervals.
Can you replace UptimeRobot by building your own?
YES. Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent. Replacement score 87 out of 100, build time one session. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does UptimeRobot cost?
$7 a month on Solo — $84 a year. Recorded 10 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing UptimeRobot?
Checks running somewhere entirely separate from your own hosting, which is the only place a monitor is worth anything; Several check locations, so a regional network problem is distinguishable from an outage; Alerting by phone and chat with escalation on the paid tiers. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to UptimeRobot?
Yes: Uptime Kuma, Gatus. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
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