Pingdom curtails their “Free” monitoring plan

There are quite a number of STH readers using Pingdom free and paid options. Pingdom provides a number of free tools, but their primary service is on uptime monitoring for sites and alerting during downtime. Pingdom recently announced that they are making large changes to their free monitoring plan. Of course, it is a great service that they have been providing for free, and it makes sense that they need to cut costs and try to drive revenue. However, many sites have been using their free service for an extended period of time and might miss this change.

Here is the comparison table that the company is providing for the change in service:

One can see that the interval is increased from 1 minute to 5 minutes and features such as IPv6 and a number of the more advanced checks are now absent. The new starter plan is $14.95/ month (with an initial migration price of $$83.40 for the initial year) so this is not a simple $5 price point conversion from unpaid to paid. For those looking for a decent alternative, one can fairly easily setup Amazon Route 53 health checks even on external sites for $0.75 per site per month. Route 53 health checks occur every few seconds from multiple test IPs, work with IPv6 and has the ability to trigger failover if you are using Route 53 DNS. While not perfect, it is a possible alternative for folks looking to add simple monitoring at a relatively low cost.

This is certainly something that longtime Pingdom “free” plan users should take notice of. It is likely we will have a guide or two in 2016 in STH on a few alternatives that are much cheaper that $14.95/ month. While Pingdom is a great service, this is a fairly aggressive curtailment of the free plan benefits which means many users will start to look for alternatives.

Here is the e-mail sent to existing free plan users:

Hi,

We are sending you this email to notify you about changes to your free Pingdom account. In an effort to deliver the best products and support for our customers that subscribe to our paid plans, we will no longer provide your existing free plan after January 28, 2016.

If you need simple uptime monitoring and alerting, we have a modified free plan available that may meet your needs. We encourage you to compare our entry level plans and decide which plan is best for you as described below. Early action on your part to this one-time offer will result in substantial savings for you over our normal rates.

Review Our Plans & Decide Which Plan Is Best For You

Check out this feature comparison page to compare features of your current free plan, the new free plan, and the Starter plan.

• Starter Plan – Save 54% vs. the price of 12 months at $14.95/month
  • The Starter plan is our most popular subscription plan.
  • We have upgraded your account (at no cost) to the Starter plan so you can check it out as a free trial through January 28, 2016.
  • Act Now. If you subscribe to the Starter plan before December 29, 2015(14 days from now), you will pay only $83.40 for an annual subscription (equivalent to $6.95/month) for the first year.
  • If you want to subscribe to the Starter plan, go to the Subscription Page and click the “Activate” button and complete the required information.
  • Please contact support@pingdom.com if you are interested in limited time discounts for our Advanced, Professional, or Enterprise plans.

• New Free Plan – Our new free plan is targeted towards users that need very simple uptime monitoring and alerting. While it is not as feature rich as your current free plan, it may have the features that are most important to you.
  • If you want to migrate your existing free account to the new free plan, you don’t need to do anything. We will migrate you to our new free plan on or around January 28, 2016.
  • Please note: You may lose website monitoring features and data that you presently use on January 28 – more details can be found on the feature comparison page.

If you have questions or want more detail regarding changes to your account, please view the FAQ page.  We appreciate the support that you have given us and look forward to continuing to serve you in the future.

Sincerely,

The Pingdom Team