If you're still running your SaaS on UptimeRobot's free plan, there's a change from December 2024 you need to know about.
Effective December 1, 2024, UptimeRobot updated their Terms of Service: the free plan is for personal, non-commercial use only. That means monitoring your SaaS product, any client work, or any revenue-generating project is now explicitly prohibited. Violations can result in account suspension.
Most devs I've talked to have no idea this happened.
The actual free plan specs in 2026
Here's what you get:
| Feature | Free |
|---|---|
| Monitors | 50 |
| Check interval | 5 minutes (fixed) |
| Integrations | 5 of 12 (email only, no Slack/webhooks) |
| Status pages | 1 (no custom domain) |
| Log retention | 3 months |
| API | 10 req/min |
| Maintenance windows | ❌ |
| Commercial use | ❌ since Dec 2024 |
The 5-minute interval in real terms
Every 5-minute check interval is a 299-second worst-case detection gap. Your site can be completely down for 4 minutes and 59 seconds before an alert fires.
That's not hypothetical — it's the math. If you check every 300 seconds and the outage starts 1 second after a check completes, you won't know for another 299.
Cockroach Labs' 2025 resilience research found 41% of companies find out about downtime from customers first. Five-minute polling is a direct contributor to that number.
The gaps that hurt most in a dev workflow
No webhooks or Slack on free. UptimeRobot's 5 free integrations don't include the ones you actually want. Slack, Discord, webhooks, and PagerDuty all require the Team plan at $29/month. You're getting email alerts only.
No maintenance windows. Deploying? Every intentional restart triggers real alerts. There's no suppression without upgrading.
API is rate-limited to 10 req/min. Paid plans go to 5,000 req/min. If you're automating anything on top of the API — custom dashboards, scripts, status integrations — you'll hit this ceiling fast.
3-month log retention. Not enough for anything resembling SLA reporting or historical trend analysis.
The Solo plan gotcha
The base Solo tier is advertised at $7/month — but it gives you 10 monitors, fewer than the free plan's 50. To match 50 monitors at 60-second intervals, you're paying ~$15/month. The $7 entry price is for a plan that's less capable monitor-count-wise than free.
Free alternatives worth considering
| Tool | Monitors | Interval | Commercial | Status Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UptimeRobot | 50 | 5 min | ❌ | 1 (no custom domain) |
| BetterStack | 10 | 30 sec | ✅ | 1 |
| HetrixTools | 15 | 1 min | ✅ | Unlimited |
| StatusCake | Unlimited | 5 min | ✅ | Basic |
| Stillup | 3 | 1 min | ✅ | 1 |
Note: Freshping is gone — shut down March 6, 2026. Don't rely on any article that still recommends it.
Bottom line
If you're a dev using UptimeRobot free for personal side projects, it's still a solid tool. 50 monitors covers a lot.
If you're using it for a SaaS or any commercial project, you've been in violation of their ToS since December 2024. Either upgrade ($15/month for monitor parity with 60-sec checks), or switch to something that still allows commercial use on free.
Canonical post: UptimeRobot Free Plan Limits in 2026 on stillup.org
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