“Free uptime monitoring” means two very different things, and the market shifted hard in 2026. Freshping shut down, Pingdom has no free plan at all, and the survivors each draw the “free” line in a different place. This page lays out the honest state of play — including what HTTP Tiger does and does not give you for free — so you can pick the right tool without a signup surprise.
The 2026 free-monitoring landscape
If you last shopped for a free uptime monitor a couple of years ago, the map has changed:
- Freshping was discontinued on March 6, 2026. Freshworks disabled free accounts and did not ship a replacement, so its former 50-monitor free tier is simply gone.
- Pingdom has no permanent free plan. Since the SolarWinds era it offers only a 14-day trial; paid synthetic monitoring starts around
$15/mobilled annually (about$19/momonthly) for 10 checks. - UptimeRobot still anchors the free tier at 50 monitors on a 5-minute interval — but SMS and voice alerts require credits you buy separately.
- Better Stack offers a smaller but polished free tier: 10 monitors at a 3-minute interval, a status page, and a single phone-call alert.
The takeaway: fewer genuinely-free continuous monitors exist than before, and the ones that remain each cap you somewhere — monitor count, check frequency, or alert channels. Knowing which cap matters to you is the whole game.
Two kinds of “free”: on-demand vs continuous
Almost every argument about “free uptime monitoring” comes down to conflating two different jobs:
| On-demand checking | Continuous monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | You run a check now and see the result instantly | A service pings your site automatically, 24/7 |
| Best for | “Is it down right now?”, deploy checks, bulk audits | Catching outages while you sleep |
| Needs an account? | Usually no | Always yes |
| Alerts you? | No — you are already looking | Yes — email, SMS, Slack, webhook |
UptimeRobot, Better Stack and Pingdom are continuous monitors. HTTP Tiger's free tier is an on-demand checker: it answers “is this URL up, and what status code is it returning?” the instant you ask, for one URL or a hundred, with no account. Its continuous, scheduled monitoring — the kind that watches your site around the clock and pings you when it breaks — lives on the paid plans. We say that plainly because picking the wrong category is the number-one reason people feel misled by a “free” tool.
Honest free-tier comparison (2026)
Everything below reflects the providers' current published free tiers as of July 2026. Where a tool has no free plan, we say so.
| Tool | Free monitors | Check interval | Free alert channels | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UptimeRobot | 50 | 5 min | Email (SMS/voice = paid credits) | Continuous |
| Better Stack | 10 | 3 min | Email + 1 phone call | Continuous |
| Pingdom | None | — (14-day trial only) | — | Continuous (paid) |
| Freshping | Shut down | — (discontinued Mar 2026) | — | — |
| HTTP Tiger | On-demand (5,000 checks/mo) | Manual / instant | — (you view results live) | On-demand |
Sources: providers' own pricing pages, July 2026. Freshping status per Freshworks' discontinuation notice.
What HTTP Tiger gives you free
HTTP Tiger's free tier is genuinely free — no credit card, no account — and it is built for the on-demand job:
- Instant up/down checks for any URL via the Is It Down? tool, from multiple network vantage points.
- Bulk status checking of up to 100 URLs per batch — paste a list, get every HTTP status code at once with the bulk HTTP status checker.
- 5,000 checks per month, 200 saved favorites, and 60-day history so you can re-run and compare.
- CSV export of every result for reporting or spreadsheets.
- A full set of companion dev tools — DNS, HTTP headers, SSL, and redirects — all free and signup-free.
For a lot of people that is enough: run a sweep before and after a deploy, confirm an outage a customer reported, or audit a portfolio of domains on demand. What it will not do on the free tier is watch your site while you are away and text you at 3 a.m. — that is what the paid monitoring plans add.
When you actually need continuous monitoring
Move from free on-demand checks to a paid, always-on monitor when downtime costs you money or trust and you cannot be the one watching. HTTP Tiger's scheduled monitoring is priced to undercut the incumbents and, unlike UptimeRobot, does not charge separately for SMS or Slack credits:
| Plan | Price | Monitored URLs | Interval | Alerts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $19/mo | 5 | Hourly | Email + REST API |
| Business | $49/mo | 25 | 15 min | Email, Slack & webhooks, SSL expiry |
| Enterprise | $99/mo | 100 | 1 min | SMS & PagerDuty, 99.9% SLA |
A useful way to choose: if you have one or a few critical sites and just want an email when they break, Pro at $19/mo is plenty. If a team needs Slack alerts and SSL-expiry warnings, Business at $49/mo covers it — still below Pingdom's list price for comparable synthetic checks. Only reach for Enterprise when you need 1-minute resolution, SMS, and an SLA. See the full breakdown on the pricing page.
Set up a free uptime check in 60 seconds
No account required — you can do this right now:
- Single site: open the Is It Down? tool, paste your URL, and read the live status and response time from multiple locations.
- Many URLs: open the bulk HTTP status checker, paste up to 100 URLs, and run them all at once to spot every 404, 500, or timeout.
- Save what matters: star the URLs you check often (up to 200 favorites) so a re-check is one click.
- Export: download the results as CSV for a report or to diff against last week.
- When free stops being enough: upgrade to scheduled monitoring so those same checks run automatically and alert you.
Check if your site is up — free, no signup
Run an instant uptime check on one URL, or sweep up to 100 at once. Upgrade to automated monitoring with alerts whenever you are ready.
Check a site now → See monitoring plansFrequently asked questions
Is HTTP Tiger free uptime monitoring really free?
$19/mo.What is the difference between on-demand checks and continuous uptime monitoring?
Is HTTP Tiger a good UptimeRobot alternative?
$49/mo and SMS at $99/mo — without buying alert credits separately.What happened to Freshping and Pingdom's free plans?
$15/mo billed annually. That is why the free monitoring options in 2026 have narrowed to a handful of providers.Does free uptime monitoring send SMS or Slack alerts?
$19/mo), Slack and webhook alerts with Business ($49/mo), and SMS with Enterprise ($99/mo) — with no per-message credit purchases.