Free monitoring for a side project
The thing you built at the weekend, watched properly, for nothing.
A side project does not justify a monitoring bill and does not deserve to fall over for a fortnight before you notice. Those are the only two options most products offer: pay for something built for a company, or find out when you next visit your own site.
The free plan is a plan rather than a trial. 5 monitors, checked as often as every 5 min, for as long as you like, without a card and without an expiry date.
What you get
Checked from three continents, like everybody else
Free accounts are not checked from fewer places or confirmed less carefully. A failure is checked again from another continent before it becomes an alert, which is the whole product and not the upgrade.
The checks a project actually has
The site or the API, the name resolving, a port being open, and the host answering: websites and APIs, DNS, TCP and ping. Mail servers, certificates, blocklists, heartbeats and sockets are on the paid plans, because they cost more to run.
Email and webhooks
Both, on the free plan. A webhook is how a side project puts an alert into whatever it already has, which is usually one chat channel.
90 days of history
The same retention as the first paid plan. Enough to see that the thing that broke on Tuesday had been failing quietly since the deploy on Friday.
When to stop using it
When five is not enough, when five minutes is too slow to matter, or when it stops being a side project and somebody else is relying on it. Those are the three walls, and they are the reason the paid plans exist rather than a limitation dressed up as one. Until you hit one, there is nothing to upgrade for and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Everything it can watch
Answers to the questions this raises are on the questions page, and the words are on the glossary.