HetrixTools watches your website and tells you when it goes down, so you hear about it before your customers do. It's for founders and small teams with a handful of sites who want proper checks without paying. The Free plan is $0 for life, with no trial clock: 15 uptime monitors and 15 server monitors, each checked every minute. If you outgrow it, Professional is $9.95 a month.
What it can do for you
Each site is checked every minute from 4 of HetrixTools' 12 locations, and it only calls an outage when more than half of them agree, which cuts false alarms. As well as up or down, the Free plan warns you before your SSL certificate or domain name expires, and tells you if your nameservers change. You can publish a public status page so customers can check for themselves.
It also covers servers (with a free agent for server stats), ports, mail servers and cron jobs. Cron jobs use heartbeat checks: your job pings HetrixTools each time it runs, and you're alerted if the pings stop. Mobile apps aren't named, but you can watch an app's backend the same way.
Why it stands out
Of the free plans we compared on 26 Oct 2026, it's the only one that covers SSL expiry and domain expiry with 1-minute checks.
The honest downsides
- Log in every 90 days. That's the one condition for keeping the free plan. Paid plans remove it.
- One email recipient. Free alerts by email go to a single address, so pick one you read quickly, or a forwarding alias.
- Texts and calls cost extra, at $0.10 each.
- A short activity log. Free keeps 15 days of activity.
Skip it if
- several people need email alerts directly and you don't want to set up a forwarding address
- you'd rather not have to remember a login every few months
Alternatives
- We don't list a better free all-round monitor.
- UptimeRobot covers 50 monitors free at 5-minute checks, but has no SSL or domain expiry alerts on Free.
- Site24x7 watches 50 websites free at 5-minute checks, with SSL certificate expiry checks.
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