Pingdom will kill its free website monitoring plan on February 6

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring and performance management service, will soon stop welcoming non-paying users. In an email sent to users today, Pingdom announced that it will be ending its free tier on February 6.

The move, which has unsurprisingly upset many users, comes five years after Pingdom was acquired by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based firm. In its email, Pingdom said it intends to focus its resources and investment on the next phase of its product development.

Founded in 2007, Pingdom attracted over 500,000 users from 200 countries in seven years, before it was acquired. Several major companies, including Google, Spotify, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Evernote, Mailchimp, Github, Square, Instagram, and others became its clients.

The service also attracted a number of individual customers and mom-and-pop stores. Through the free tier plan, Pingdom offered users the ability to track uptime, monitor performance, and receive text alerts for a single website. For individuals and small businesses, the free plan understandably fit the bill. (At the time of acquisition, SolarWinds had said that it was committed to developing Pingdom for businesses of all sizes.)

in which @pingdom gives up on freemium.

— Justin (@xxdesmus) January 7, 2019

That sucks: @Pingdom is discontinuing their Free Plan in a month, on February 6th. They’re offering free users 50% off their starter plan for the first 2 years. If you pay monthly, that’ll be $7.5/mo ($15/mo later).

I can’t justify even $5/mo for this, personally… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

— Levi Figueira (@levifig) January 7, 2019

@pingdom is removing their free tier. If engineered correctly, free tier users really shouldn't have been costing the company very much. This is very disappointing.

— Antony Williams (@antonydwilliams) January 7, 2019

https://twitter.com/dannosaur7/status/1082342507839660032

Alternatives

If you are a Pingdom user looking for a free alternative, there are a handful of services that you can try. Here are three options:

• StatusCake offers 10 uptime tests every 5 minutes, and one page speed test every day. It counts Microsoft, Netflix, and GoDaddy among its clients.
• Pingbreak is still in beta, but lets you track SSL and response time. It double checks results with an external agency. As of today, it does not let users sign up without a Twitter account.
• Uptime Robot offers five minutes of monitoring intervals and 50 monitoring instances in a day. You can also review two months of logs. Uptime Robot counts Expedia, Fandango, and Staples among its clients.

Pingdom is meanwhile urging free users to become paid subscribers. The company offers several plans ranging from $15 per month to $395 per month for those with enterprise-level needs. (It also offers annual plans with introductory discounts.)