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.)