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Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan
Hey HN, I am using uptimerobot.com for some years now through its free plan. It monitors some hobby-non really important projects. The same plan is advertised here: https://uptimerobot.com/pricing/
However, before some days I got the following email: "From 1st November 2024, our Free Plan is for non-commercial use only. If you're using it for business, you'll need to upgrade to a paid plan and now they are forcing me to update."
- paulcole 2y agoIf you want a free lunch, I can understand when you’re eventually disappointed.
- stop50 2y agoHow is this plan fake?
- fer 2y agoOP didn't explain it well (at least what's happening to me): I am a free user for non-commercial purposes and they're terminating me if I don't upgrade to paid plan. The free option appears but it's unavailable to select. I only use it to monitor the Uptime Kuma that monitors the rest of my homelab.
- bigs 2y agoSounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.
- evanelias 2y agoNot OP, but part of the problem here is the "non-commercial use" restriction was a retroactive change to their terms of service. Their free plan previously had no such restriction. On November 4, they emailed free plan users describing an "Upcoming Change to UptimeRobot Free Plan ToS" which somehow already took effect on November 1. They aren't actually enforcing the change until December 1, but even then, that's still less than a month of notice. Even for non-commercial purposes, I wouldn't trust this service after this move.
- paulcole 2y agoWhat do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?
- evanelias 2y agoFor starters, provide more than 26 days of notice about enforcing a major ToS change which effectively eliminates the free plan for many users. And don't send emails about an "upcoming" change which was already made to the ToS 3 days prior to the email being sent.
- paulcole 2y agoWhat would have been the correct number of days notice?
- evanelias 2y agoI'd certainly expect at least 30 days. Or more if the deadline lines up with a major holiday weekend, as this one does in the US! Doing this with less than 30 day deadline means I won't trust the service again for any purpose, whether non-commercial or commercial. I'm perfectly happy to pay someone for this service if needed, but it certainly won't be Uptimerobot after this experience. Why are you harping on about this?
- paulcole 2y ago> Why are you harping on about this? I’m pretty confident that if they’d given 30 days you’d say that 45 days was the minimum.
- evanelias 2y agoI have no recollection of ever interacting with you before, so why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader? I really don't know what your problem is, but seriously you're way out of line. Do you work for Uptimerobot or something? Not that it's any of your business, but I signed up for Uptimerobot only barely two months prior to receiving this email about the free plan change. I was using it as a secondary/auxiliary uptime monitoring service for my bootstrapped business, to supplement my primary monitoring. In that brief time, I had no actual outages, but Uptimerobot did have one false positive outage report where they claimed my site was down when it wasn't. So my overall impression of their service was already "need more time to see if this is worth paying for". Upon then receiving notice that they would be terminating the free plan during Thanksgiving weekend with less than a month of notice, my impression changed to "never ever trust this service for anything". If they had instead offered a more reasonable time period, I would have seriously considered switching to a paid plan, assuming there were no further repeats of their false positive alerts. I was only using Uptimerobot to monitor 2 sites, which means they were sending less than 600 tiny HEAD requests to my infra per day. The approximate cost of that to them should easily be less than one cent per month. fwiw, my own product has a free version which has been downloaded over 2 million times and is used by several thousand companies, including some of the largest companies in the world who nonetheless pay me nothing. Despite that, there is no conceivable situation in which I would discontinue a free product with only 26 days notice, as that just pisses off users, flushes reputation down the toilet, and is completely counterproductive to improving revenue.
- arminsergiony 2y agoHere are a lot of alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1g15gqe/uptimerobot_alternative_after_their_tos_changes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1g15gqe/uptimerob... Why should people use just one tool all the time? There are many alternatives in this world, free as well.
- mtmail 2y agoIn my SaaS niche that's common. Some also exclude automated scripts (free only for manual testing), asset tracking (IOT devices sending 24/7) or "you're not allowed to permanently save the output of the tool". I wouldn't call that fake.
- xcubic 2y agoAre you switching?
- RockRobotRock 2y agoFind a cheap VPS and host Uptime Kuma. Thank me later :)
- yread 2y agoI switched to Kuma recently, but it's not all roses either. Their Docker image is based on Debian 10 with Go 1.19 and they don't feel the need to update because "OS level bugs are seldomely exploitable" https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma/issues/4885 https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma/issues/4885 So host it on a separate machine and don't put any secrets in there
- RockRobotRock 2y agoI use Cloudflare zero trust to secure it.
- theshrike79 2y agoIf you're a business and can't afford $7 a month, then self-host an uptime checking tool like Uptime Kuma on a $5 Digital Ocean server.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rozenmd 2y agoI also run an uptime monitoring service with the same limitation, it's not sustainable in the long term to offer a free tier otherwise. A bit annoyed about this change though, I used to recommend folks looking for a ridiculous free tier use uptime robot instead.
- andrew-jack 2y ago[flagged]
- arminsergiony 2y agoIs the custom domain for status pages available on the free plan?
- andrew-jack 2y agoYes.
- Heleana 2y agoHow about the commercial use of the free plan?
- andrew-jack 2y agoAt this point, yes. I don't know what will happen in future.
- rozenmd 2y agoPlease don't use multiple accounts to promote your business on HN.
- andrew-jack 2y agoIt's not my business, I also can recommend the Uptime Kuma (selfhosted)...
- vextea 2y agoWhat about your earlier Show HN post for the same service where you quote: > I've created the best free website downtime checker. Don't trust me? Try it yourself.