A solo developer launched his SaaS on a Friday evening. Saturday morning, his Stripe webhook endpoint was down. He lost 14 hours of signups before a customer emailed him.
The Monitoring Gap
Enterprise monitoring (Datadog, New Relic) costs $15-30 per host per month. For indie developers, that is often more than the server itself.
Uptime Kuma is a free, self-hosted monitoring tool that checks your websites, APIs, and services and alerts you the SECOND something goes down.
What Uptime Kuma Offers for Free
- HTTP(s) Monitoring - Check any URL with custom intervals (every 20 seconds)
- TCP/UDP/DNS/MQTT - Monitor databases, game servers, IoT brokers
- 90+ Notification Channels - Telegram, Discord, Slack, Email, Webhooks
- Status Pages - Public status page for your users (like statuspage.io but free)
- Certificate Monitoring - Alert before SSL certificates expire
- Docker Support - One-line deployment
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, add your first monitor. Done in 60 seconds.
Uptime Kuma vs Paid Tools
| Feature | Uptime Kuma | UptimeRobot Free | Datadog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitors | Unlimited | 50 | Per-host |
| Check Interval | 20 seconds | 5 minutes | 15 seconds |
| Status Pages | Free | Paid | Paid |
| Self-Hosted | Yes | No | No |
| Cost | $0 | $0-7/mo | $15+/host |
GitHub: louislam/uptime-kuma - 62K+ stars
Need to monitor and scrape data from multiple web services automatically? I build custom scraping solutions. Check out my web scraping toolkit or email me at spinov001@gmail.com for a tailored solution.
Top comments (0)