Rented vantage points against a box you own
UptimeRobot is good. It is also rented.
The free tier is real, and commercial use is allowed.
This page compares what a per-client, branded, private setup costs when you rent it monthly against buying it once, and names the things UptimeRobot does that a single self-hosted box cannot.
A pricing decision, tier by tier.
UptimeRobot is a fine product, and for a lot of people the right one. The question is what happens when the job becomes per-client.
Free
Commercial use allowed
The free plan permits commercial use. UptimeRobot's terms read "available for any use, including commercial and business use", and 50 monitors for nothing is a real offer. What it does not give an agency is the shape of the job: checks run every five minutes, you get one status page, five integrations, three months of history, and no login seat at all. The entry paid tier, Solo, adds three login seats. Fine for watching your own sites. Not a per-client, branded, multi-seat setup.
Paid
Monthly, forever
The paid plans are straightforward SaaS: a monthly bill that scales with monitors and features. Solo is 10 monitors and three login seats, Team 100 monitors, and Scale 500. The check interval moves with the tier: 60 s on Solo, 30 s on Team, 15 s on Scale. Tiers as published, July 2026; uptimerobot.com quotes the amounts in its own currency, so read them there. Global probe locations and zero maintenance. The bill recurs monthly, and the uptime history lives in their cloud.
Self-hosted · $149 once
One payment, one company, no meters: unlimited monitors, unlimited client status pages, unlimited seats, plus the things UptimeRobot doesn't bundle at any tier: verified auto-recovery (a signed trigger to your restart hook, probed before and after), four-role RBAC, isolated tenants per client, incident timelines with postmortems, and full source code with private modification rights. Alerts by member email and 25 native provider types (Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Google Chat, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Matrix, Zulip, LINE, PagerDuty, Jira Service Management, Pushover, Gotify, ntfy, Pushbullet, Bark, Web Push, Home Assistant, Twilio SMS, Twilio WhatsApp, SMTP, Resend, signed webhooks and Amazon SNS), plus additional services through your own Apprise server, with on-call schedules and escalation policies that can page by SMS or voice through your own Twilio account.
They bring a global probe network and 24/7 ops; you bring the machines and own everything on them. One $5 VPS is enough to start, and remote probe agents add vantage points wherever you already have hardware. The license is readable before you pay.
Three cases.
UptimeRobot
Small setups
You monitor a handful of personal projects, or you want checks from many global locations and don't want to run a server. The paid tier is fair for that. Do not buy self-hosted software you do not want to host.
to Vigil
The agency case
You bill clients for site care. Then monitoring is a line item you bill for: every client gets a branded status page on your domain, your team gets roles, and the per-monitor meter disappears. The agency workflow, spelled out.
first
no login
Click through the interactive demo, the real app on seeded data, no signup: monitors fail, an incident opens itself, the status page updates, recovery closes it.