Paying $29/month for UptimeRobot Pro to monitor 10 URLs felt wrong. Especially when all I needed was: ping my services, tell me when something's down, show a status page.
Uptime Kuma does exactly that. Self-hosted, beautiful UI, and completely free. Setup took 2 minutes.
What You Get Free
MIT licensed:
- HTTP(S) monitoring — check any URL, verify status codes/keywords
- TCP/Ping/DNS — monitor any port or service
- Status pages — public status pages for your users
- Notifications — Telegram, Slack, Discord, Email, Webhook, 90+ services
- Maintenance windows — scheduled downtime without false alerts
- Multi-language — 30+ languages supported
- 2FA — secure your dashboard
- API — programmatic access to all features
- Docker/Steam Game monitoring — check container and game server status
- Certificate monitoring — SSL expiry alerts
- Response time graphs — historical performance data
Quick Start
docker run -d --restart=always \
-p 3001:3001 \
-v uptime-kuma:/app/data \
--name uptime-kuma \
louislam/uptime-kuma:1
Open http://localhost:3001, create account, add monitors. That's it.
What You Can Build
1. Service health dashboard — monitor all your apps, APIs, databases from one place.
2. Public status page — status.yourcompany.com for customers.
3. SSL expiry alerts — never miss a certificate renewal.
4. Incident management — maintenance windows, incident notes, historical uptime.
5. Home server monitoring — check Pi-hole, NAS, router, smart home services.
Uptime Kuma vs Alternatives
vs UptimeRobot: Self-hosted = unlimited monitors for free. UptimeRobot limits free to 50.
vs Pingdom: No per-monitor pricing. Your data on your server.
vs Statuspage.io: Free status pages vs $29+/month from Atlassian.
Need monitoring setup? Email spinov001@gmail.com
More free tiers: 61+ Free APIs Every Developer Should Bookmark
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