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Sounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.

by bigs 2y ago

evanelias 2y ago
Not 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 ago
  What do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?
  - evanelias 2y ago
    For 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 ago
      What would have been the correct number of days notice?
      - evanelias 2y ago
        I'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 ago
        I 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.
        paulcole 2y ago
        > why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader? Sorry, I’m implying that most people are cheap freeloaders. > If they had instead offered a more reasonable time period, I would have seriously considered switching to a paid plan Easy to say now that you’ve found a reason to justify not doing that. > 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. Whether it’s easily less than one cent per month or not, it’s more than the zero cents you were paying them. > there is no conceivable situation in which I would discontinue a free product with only 26 days notice Try conceiving harder. Of course there are situations when you’d discontinue a free product with 26 days notice.
arminsergiony 2y ago
Here 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.

Sounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.

by bigs 2y ago

Sounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.

Not 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 ago
What do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?
- evanelias 2y ago
  For 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 ago
    What would have been the correct number of days notice?
    - evanelias 2y ago
      I'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 ago
        I 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.
        paulcole 2y ago
        > why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader? Sorry, I’m implying that most people are cheap freeloaders. > If they had instead offered a more reasonable time period, I would have seriously considered switching to a paid plan Easy to say now that you’ve found a reason to justify not doing that. > 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. Whether it’s easily less than one cent per month or not, it’s more than the zero cents you were paying them. > there is no conceivable situation in which I would discontinue a free product with only 26 days notice Try conceiving harder. Of course there are situations when you’d discontinue a free product with 26 days notice.

arminsergiony 2y ago

Here 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.