Better Stack monitors your website, email servers and scheduled jobs, and pairs that with a status page and team alerts. Its free plan is labelled "Free for personal projects", so it suits side projects and early-stage founders. Free is $0 and covers 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, and Slack and email alerts. The first paid plan, Responder, is $34 a month.
What it can do for you
It runs HTTP(S) checks with keyword matching, so a page that loads but shows an error still counts as down. It also pings servers, checks mail servers (POP3, IMAP and SMTP) and DNS servers, and watches cron jobs with heartbeats: your job pings Better Stack each time it runs, and you're told if it stops.
For more complex sites, it offers Playwright transaction checks, which script a journey such as signing in and check that it still works. Mobile apps aren't named, but you can watch an app's backend through its API or a heartbeat.
The honest downsides
- Free check interval not stated. The pricing page says paid plans check "up to 30 seconds", but doesn't say how often free checks run.
- SSL and domain expiry plan not stated. SSL and "TLD expiration monitoring" are listed as features, but not which plan includes them.
- Aimed at personal projects. That's how the free plan is labelled, so business use isn't clearly covered.
- A big step up. Responder is $34 a month.
Skip it if
- you need to know exactly what the free plan covers before you start
- the monitor is for a business site and you want clear terms
Alternatives
- Better pick for clear free limits: HetrixTools. It states its limits plainly: 15 sites at 1-minute checks, with SSL, domain and nameserver alerts. The catch: you must log in every 90 days.
- Instatus gives you a status page with 15 monitors built in, at 2-minute checks, free and with no card.
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