UptimeRobot's pricing page looks simple until you start counting. Free is $0 for 50 monitors, but the first paid tier actually gives you fewer monitors than free, just faster checks. Here's the real 2026 breakdown: Free $0 (50 monitors, 5-minute checks), Solo $12/month billed annually (10 monitors, 60-second checks), Team $39/month billed annually (100 monitors, 30-second checks), and Scale $79/month billed annually (200-500 monitors, 15-second checks). Month-to-month, those three paid tiers run $13, $46, and $98.
All numbers below were checked directly against UptimeRobot's live pricing page and homepage on 2026-10-22. UptimeRobot updates pricing periodically, so treat this as the current shape and confirm on their page before you commit.
How much does UptimeRobot cost?
- Free: $0/month. 50 monitors, 5-minute checks.
- Solo: $13/month, or $12/month billed annually ($144/year). 10 monitors, 60-second checks.
- Team: $46/month, or $39/month billed annually ($468/year). 100 monitors, 30-second checks.
- Scale: $98/month, or $79/month billed annually ($948/year). 200-500 monitors, 15-second checks.
- Enterprise: custom-quoted.
SMS and voice-call alerts are metered separately from the plan price, as a one-time credit purchase: $3 for 10 credits, $15 for 100, $25 for 200, $55 for 500, $100 for 1,000. Free and Solo include zero credits by default. Team includes 30 credits, and Scale includes 50 to 200 depending on the tier you land on.
Two other guides currently ranking for "UptimeRobot pricing" list different numbers for Team and Scale than UptimeRobot's own page shows right now, and they don't agree with each other either, one says Team is $35/mo annually and Scale is $65, the other says $33 and $69. Neither matches UptimeRobot's current $39 and $79. Pricing pages for fast-moving SaaS tools go stale between the time a guide is written and the time you read it, which is exactly why it's worth checking the vendor's page yourself before budgeting around any blog's number, including this one a few months from now.
Why does Solo have fewer monitors than Free?
This is the part that catches people off guard. You'd expect every paid tier to simply add more of everything than free. UptimeRobot doesn't work that way.
Free optimizes for breadth: 50 monitors, checked slowly (every 5 minutes), with alerts over email and the free integrations. Solo optimizes for speed on a small set: only 10 monitors, but checked every 60 seconds, plus login seats, status pages, and longer data retention.
So if you're watching more than 10 things, upgrading to Solo doesn't just feel underwhelming, it's a step backward on monitor count. The tier that actually adds both more monitors and faster checks is Team, at $39/month billed annually for 100 monitors at 30-second intervals. Know which constraint you're solving for (how many things, or how fast) before you pick a plan, because the obvious "next tier up" isn't always a strict upgrade here.
Does the free plan allow commercial use?
It's murkier than either side of the internet claims. UptimeRobot's own marketing copy calls the free plan "good for hobby and non-profit projects," which reads like a soft nudge rather than a rule. Searching their site for an actual terms-of-service page that spells out a commercial-use restriction turned up nothing linked from the pricing or home page as of this writing.
Meanwhile, the two blogs currently ranking for this exact question contradict each other: one states flatly that the free plan is "non-commercial use only," the other says it's explicitly fine for commercial use, "not just personal experiments." Both can't be right, and neither cites UptimeRobot's own terms to settle it.
If keeping your production monitoring on a free plan and staying on the right side of someone's terms of service matters to your business, don't take a blog's word for it, including this one. Ask UptimeRobot support directly, or watch for a terms page that actually states the rule.
What does UptimeRobot actually monitor?
More than uptime. UptimeRobot's monitor types cover HTTP/HTTPS, keyword checks (in server responses and on-page), ping, port, cron jobs and heartbeats, website change detection, response time, DNS changes, SSL certificates, and domain expiry. Alerts go out over email, SMS, voice call, push, and a long integrations list: Telegram, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Mattermost, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Pushbullet, Pushover, webhooks, and Zapier.
That's a genuinely broad feature set for the price, especially the 50-monitor free tier and native cron/heartbeat support, both of which some competitors charge extra for or don't offer at all.
What would a small setup actually cost on UptimeRobot?
Say you're running one marketing site, the API behind it, the API behind a companion iOS app, and three nightly cron jobs you want heartbeat-pinged. That's 6 things to watch.
On Free, all 6 fit comfortably inside the 50-monitor cap, but you're stuck checking every 5 minutes; a service that dies right after a check could be down for most of that window before you hear about it. Move to Solo and you get 60-second checks, and 6 monitors still fits inside the 10-monitor cap, so for this exact scale, Solo at $12/month annually is the plan that matches what you need. Grow past 10 things to watch, and you jump straight to Team at $39/month annually, there's no middle tier between 10 and 100 monitors.
Is UptimeRobot worth it?
For a lot of people, yes. 50 free monitors is a genuinely generous floor, the monitor-type list is broad, cron/heartbeat monitoring is native rather than bolted on, and Telegram, Slack, and Discord alerts all work out of the box without a paid add-on. If you want one tool that also does SSL expiry, DNS change detection, and keyword checks on top of uptime, UptimeRobot covers that ground.
Where it gets annoying is the monitor-count ladder: the jump from 10 (Solo) to 100 (Team) with nothing in between, the SMS credits sold separately from every plan, and pricing that, per the discrepancies above, seems to shift often enough that third-party guides can't keep up with it.
What's a simpler alternative for a solo dev or small team?
If your setup is a web app, the API behind it, and a handful of cron jobs, CanaryHub skips the monitor-count ladder entirely:
- Free: $0. 1 project, 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, Telegram alerts batched every 4 hours, and an AI daily digest.
- Pro: $8.99/month, or $71/year (about $5.92/month). 3 projects, unlimited monitors, 60-second checks, and instant alerts with no batching.
There's no tier where upgrading shrinks your monitor count, and no separate SMS credit ledger to track. CanaryHub also does cron and heartbeat monitoring the same way UptimeRobot does, ping a URL on a schedule and get alerted if it stops:
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://ingest.canaryhub.ai/ping/YOUR_TOKEN
To be fair about the trade: UptimeRobot's SSL-certificate expiry tracking, DNS change detection, keyword monitoring, and its much longer integrations list (PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Mattermost, Google Chat) are real capabilities CanaryHub doesn't have. If you need any of those, or you're already comfortably inside UptimeRobot's free 50-monitor tier, there's no reason to switch. But if you've been doing the monitor-count math above and it keeps landing on "we'll grow past this tier soon," unlimited monitors at one flat price is the simpler answer.