Free uptime monitoring for your blog, homelab and side projects

What you get on the Free plan

The Uptime Tracker Free plan lets you monitor your most important site for free: 2 standard monitors, 5 heartbeat monitors and one status page, with no time limit and no credit card. That covers a homepage plus one more check, such as a second site or a DNS record, and the heartbeats can watch cron jobs and internal services. Sign in with your email address, and you can have your first site monitored within a few minutes.

• 2 standard monitors checked every 5 minutes: websites with keyword checks, TCP ports and DNS records.
• 5 heartbeat monitors for cron jobs, backup scripts and anything that should check in every 15 seconds to 1 hour.
• TLS certificate validation on every HTTPS check, so a broken Let's Encrypt renewal shows up as an alert.
• Alerts to email, Telegram, Discord, Slack and signed webhooks.
• One public status page with up to 50 email subscribers, handy for a community project or a small Discord server.
• Two-factor sign-in with TOTP and recovery codes, plus API access and the monctl CLI.

History on Free covers 24 hours of raw check results, 7 days of incidents and 30 days of aggregated uptime and latency. For a personal site that is usually all you need: you want to know when something breaks, not build a year-long report.

If a side project grows into a business, the Free plan allows commercial use, so you do not have to upgrade just because you started charging. When you want to watch more than a site or two, Starter raises the limit to 10 standard monitors. See pricing for when Starter starts to make sense.

Monitoring a homelab from the outside

A hosted monitor is the one piece of a homelab that should not run in the homelab: if your power, router or internet connection fails, a monitor running on the same network goes down with it and cannot tell you. Uptime Tracker runs elsewhere, so it notices when your home goes dark.

There are two ways to watch homelab services:

Standard monitors cannot target private addresses such as 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x; that protection stops the service from being used to probe internal networks. Heartbeats solve this neatly because the request goes outbound from your network, so nothing needs to be exposed. A one-line example:

*/5 * * * * curl -fsS http://192.168.1.20:8123 > /dev/null && curl -fsS https://uptimetracker.live/api/v1/heartbeats/<token> > /dev/null

If the local service stops responding, or the whole network goes offline, the heartbeat stops and you are alerted. See cron job monitoring for interval and grace-period details.

Alerts homelab users actually like: Telegram, Discord, ntfy and Gotify

On the Free plan, Telegram and Discord are the most popular alert channels for personal projects, because they are free, instant and already on your phone. Telegram alerts come from a bot to a chat you verify with a code; Discord alerts arrive through a channel webhook.

Many self-hosters prefer ntfy, Gotify or Pushover for push notifications. Be aware of the plan split:

• Free: email, Telegram, Discord, Slack and signed webhooks.
• Starter ($9/month): adds ntfy (public or protected topics), Gotify (your self-hosted server), Pushover, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and SMS.

If you want ntfy or Gotify but prefer to stay on Free, a generic webhook can feed a small relay you run yourself. Webhooks are signed with HMAC-SHA256 so your relay can verify that events really came from Uptime Tracker.

Whichever channel you use, alerts are only sent after two consecutive failed checks, and a recovery message follows when the service is back. That matters on a home connection, where a brief blip should not buzz your phone at night. Every channel is listed on the integrations page.

Already running Uptime Kuma?

Uptime Kuma is a popular open-source monitor that you host and maintain yourself, and many homelabs run it. You do not have to choose one or the other: a common pattern is to keep Kuma for detailed internal checks and use Uptime Tracker for external checks plus a watch on Kuma itself.

Why add a hosted monitor alongside a self-hosted one:

• Independent vantage point. Uptime Tracker sees your services the way the internet does, including DNS, TLS certificates and your router's port forwarding.
• Monitoring the monitor. Add a heartbeat that your Kuma host pings every few minutes, or an HTTPS monitor on Kuma's public page. If the Kuma box dies, you still find out.
• Alerts during home outages. When your internet is down, Kuma cannot send alerts; a hosted service can.

If you want to move monitors over, Uptime Tracker imports Uptime Kuma JSON backups. HTTP and keyword, port, ping, DNS, push and gRPC monitors are mapped automatically, and any unsupported types are reported so you know what to recreate. Ping and gRPC monitors need Starter and Team respectively, and push monitors become heartbeats. Free includes two standard monitors, so a larger Kuma setup fits Starter's 10 or Team's 50. More detail on how tools differ is on the comparison pages.

A five-minute setup for a personal site

You can cover your main personal site on Free in a few minutes.

1. Sign in with your email. There is no password; you get a one-time link or code.
2. Add an HTTPS monitor for your main site with a keyword from the page, such as your name or site title.
3. Use your second monitor for another public project or an important DNS record, such as the A record of your server.
4. Connect Telegram or Discord and send alerts there.
5. Add a heartbeat to your backup script so you know the night it stops running.
6. Turn on two-factor authentication in your account settings.

Optionally, create a status page for a project with users, such as a game server or open-source service, and link it from your README or Discord. Within a day you will have a baseline of response times, which makes it easy to spot when a hosting change makes your site slower.

When to move from Free to Starter

If you run a site or two and a few scheduled jobs, Free may be all you need. Starter at $9 per month ($90 per year) is worth it when one of these applies:

A common path is to stay on Free while a project is a hobby, then switch to Starter when it gains users who would notice a 10-minute outage, when you need more than two standard monitors, or when you want ntfy or Gotify alerts for the homelab. Annual billing for Starter is $90, two months cheaper than paying monthly. You can also try every paid feature with the 14-day Team trial, no card needed.

If you later downgrade, nothing is deleted: monitors above the limit are paused and status pages archived. Compare every limit on the pricing page.