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Simple, affordable website monitoring with pay-per-check pricing
updown.io is a French uptime monitoring service built on a radically simple premise: you buy credits, and each monitoring check consumes a fraction of a credit. This pay-per-check model means a site monitored every 30 seconds costs roughly EUR 0.60 per month — a fraction of what subscription-based tools charge. Created in 2012 as an open-source side project by a French developer, updown.io has grown into a trusted monitoring service used by thousands of developers who value simplicity, transparency, and fair pricing over feature bloat.
Headquarters
France, France
Founded
2012
Pricing
EU Data Hosting
Yes
Employees
1-10
Open Source
Yes
Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go
Billing: prepaid-credits
Consider the economics of uptime monitoring. Pingdom charges EUR 13 per month for 10 monitors at 1-minute intervals. UptimeRobot's Pro plan starts at USD 7 per month for 50 monitors. Now consider updown.io: monitoring a single website every 30 seconds costs approximately EUR 0.60 per month. Ten sites at 30-second intervals: roughly EUR 6 per month. Fifty sites: around EUR 30 per month.
updown.io achieves this through a fundamentally different pricing model. Instead of monthly subscriptions, you buy credits. Each monitoring check consumes a tiny fraction of a credit. Credits never expire. You pay for actual monitoring activity rather than access to a platform.
Created in 2012 by a French developer as an open-source side project, updown.io has grown into a monitoring service trusted by thousands of developers and small teams across Europe. The codebase is publicly available on GitHub, which provides a level of transparency that no subscription-based monitoring service can match — you can read exactly how your sites are being monitored.
The service monitors HTTP and HTTPS endpoints from multiple global locations, tracks response times, calculates Apdex performance scores, monitors SSL certificate expiry, and generates public status pages. It does not do server monitoring, synthetic transactions, real user monitoring, or incident management. This is monitoring reduced to its essence: is your site up, how fast is it responding, and is your SSL certificate valid?
The numbers tell the story. One credit on updown.io enables approximately 17,000 checks. At 30-second intervals, that translates to roughly 2,880 checks per day per monitor, or about 87,600 checks per month. One credit covers one monitor for about 6 months at 30-second intervals.
Credit packs are priced progressively. The exact cost per credit varies, but the effective monthly cost per monitor works out to fractions of a euro. For teams monitoring 5-20 sites, the annual cost can be less than a single month of Pingdom.
This model has an important behavioural effect: it discourages waste. There is no "unlimited monitors" plan encouraging you to monitor endpoints you do not care about. You monitor what matters, at the interval that matters, and you pay proportionally.
updown.io records response times for every check and presents them as historical charts. The data includes median response time, 95th percentile, and Apdex scores — a standardised measure of user satisfaction based on response time thresholds.
The Apdex integration is a thoughtful inclusion. Rather than just showing "up" or "down," it quantifies service quality. An Apdex score of 0.95 tells you that 95% of checks met your target response time. A score declining from 0.92 to 0.85 over a week signals degradation before your site actually goes down.
Response time data is retained historically, letting you track performance trends over months. For teams optimising site speed, this longitudinal data is valuable — and included at no extra cost.
updown.io checks your SSL certificates on every monitoring request and alerts you before expiry. Given that the median Let's Encrypt certificate is 90 days and auto-renewal mechanisms can fail silently, this is a genuinely useful safety net. The monitoring also validates certificate chains and configuration.
Each monitor can be exposed on a public status page showing current status, response time history, and uptime percentage. The pages are minimal and functional — no custom branding or incident update features. For projects that need a basic "is it up?" page for users, this covers the requirement without additional tooling.
The updown.io codebase is available on GitHub. This is rare among monitoring services and provides unique advantages. You can audit exactly how monitoring works, verify that checks are performed as described, and trust the service based on code rather than marketing claims. For security-conscious teams, this transparency is meaningful.
The REST API provides programmatic access to all monitoring data — check results, response times, downtimes, and metrics. Webhook support enables custom integrations, and built-in notification channels include email, Slack, Telegram, and SMS. Zapier integration connects updown.io to thousands of other services.
The API is well-documented and follows RESTful conventions. For developers who want to build monitoring into their deployment pipelines or dashboards, it is straightforward to integrate.
The raw numbers make the case. Here is a comparison based on monitoring 10 websites at 30-second intervals:
updown.io is the cheapest option while offering the shortest check intervals. The credit model means costs scale linearly with usage — there are no pricing tiers to jump between, no features locked behind higher plans.
Credits are purchased in advance and never expire. New accounts receive free credits sufficient for several weeks of monitoring. There is no permanent free tier, but the cost of entry is so low — a few euros for months of monitoring — that the distinction is academic for most users.
The trade-off is explicit: you get uptime monitoring, response times, and SSL checks. You do not get server monitoring, synthetic browser testing, real user monitoring, or incident management. If you need those capabilities, you need a different tool. updown.io is not trying to be a platform — it is trying to be the best and cheapest way to know whether your sites are up.
updown.io is a French service operating under EU jurisdiction and GDPR by default. The company's data practices are minimal by design — it collects URLs, response times, and notification preferences. There is no user behaviour tracking, no analytics beyond what is necessary for the monitoring service, and no data monetisation.
The open-source codebase reinforces this: anyone can verify what data the service collects and how it is processed. For teams that need to document data processing activities for GDPR compliance, updown.io's minimal footprint makes the assessment straightforward.
As a French sole proprietorship rather than a venture-backed company, there is no corporate pressure to expand data collection for growth metrics or advertising. The business model — selling monitoring credits — aligns with minimal data processing.
Independent developers and small teams monitoring 1-50 websites who want reliable uptime monitoring at the lowest possible cost. The credit model eliminates subscription waste.
Cost-conscious organisations that need monitoring but cannot justify enterprise pricing. At EUR 0.60 per site per month, updown.io is effectively free for small portfolios.
Developers who value transparency and want to inspect the monitoring service's source code. No other monitoring tool offers this level of openness.
Teams that already have observability tooling (Grafana, Datadog) and need a simple, cheap external uptime check as a complement — not a replacement.
updown.io proves that monitoring does not need to be expensive or complex. The credit-based pricing model is the fairest in the industry, the interface is the fastest to set up, and the open-source codebase provides unmatched transparency. It deliberately trades feature breadth for simplicity and cost — no server monitoring, no incident management, no synthetic transactions. For teams that need to know whether their sites are up and how fast they are responding, updown.io delivers that answer for less money than any competitor, from a French service operating under EU law.
A single website monitored every 30 seconds costs approximately EUR 0.60 per month. Ten sites at the same interval cost roughly EUR 6 per month. The exact cost depends on check frequency — less frequent checks cost proportionally less.
Yes, the updown.io codebase is available on GitHub. You can review the monitoring logic, verify data handling, and contribute improvements. This level of transparency is unique among monitoring services.
updown.io is cheaper and offers shorter check intervals (15 seconds vs 1 minute on UptimeRobot's free tier). UptimeRobot offers a permanent free plan with 50 monitors and a more feature-rich interface. updown.io is better for cost-optimised monitoring; UptimeRobot is better for a free starting point.
updown.io provides free credits on signup — enough for several weeks of monitoring. There is no permanent free tier, but the credit-based pricing is so low that ongoing costs are negligible for small deployments.
updown.io is a French service operating under EU jurisdiction and GDPR. Monitoring data is processed in accordance with EU data protection laws, and the minimal data collection approach aligns with privacy-by-design principles.
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