Uptime monitoring checks your product from the outside, every minute or so, and tells you the moment something stops answering. For a SaaS, the point is simple: you should find out it’s down before your customers do, not from an angry email at 9am about an outage that started at 3.
This guide covers what to monitor, how alerts should work, and seven uptime monitoring tools small SaaS teams use, with prices from each company’s own site.
What to monitor on a SaaS
Most teams start and stop at the homepage. That’s the page least likely to break. Monitor the paths that make you money and the jobs that run when nobody is watching:
- Your app, not just your site. The login page and a page behind it, checked for a keyword that only appears when it really loaded. A server can return 200 while showing an error page.
- Your API. The endpoints your product and your customers call, with assertions on the response, not just the status code.
- Checkout and signup. If payments break, every minute costs real money.
- Background jobs. Cron jobs, queues and nightly exports fail silently. A heartbeat monitor expects a ping on schedule and raises the alarm when it doesn’t arrive.
- SSL certificates and domains. An expired certificate takes the whole product down. Get warned weeks before.
- Slowness. A checkout that takes twelve seconds isn’t down, but customers leave anyway. Look for a “degraded” state, separate from “down”.
Alerts that wake the right person
A monitor is only as good as its alert. Three things matter for a small team:
- The right channel at the right hour. Slack in the day. A phone call at 3am for anything that matters. Quiet hours for everything that doesn’t.
- Escalation. If the first person doesn’t respond, the next one hears about it.
- Fewer false alarms. Checks from more than one place, and a retry before alerting, stop one flaky request from waking you up.
Tell customers before they ask
A public status page turns “is it down?” support tickets into one link. Customers subscribe, you post updates as you fix it, and your support inbox stays quiet during the incident. It works best when the status page, the monitors and the support inbox live together, so customers asking in chat get pointed at the live incident. (If you’re choosing a support inbox too, see AI customer support tools for small SaaS teams.)
Seven uptime monitoring tools compared
| Tool | Free plan | Paid plans start at | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rectify | 1 monitor, status page | $29 a month (3 monitors, plus the rest of Rectify) | Uptime, status page and support in one place |
| UptimeRobot | 50 monitors, 5-minute checks, hobby and non-profit use | Solo plan, 60-second checks | Lots of simple monitors |
| Better Stack | 10 monitors, 1 status page, personal projects | $34 a month per on-call responder ($29 yearly) | On-call and incident management |
| Checkly | 10 uptime monitors, 2-minute checks | $24 a month, billed yearly | API and browser checks written as code |
| Cronitor | 5 monitors | $2 a monitor and $5 a user a month | Cron jobs and background tasks |
| Pingdom | Free trial | Priced by number of checks | Established teams that want RUM too |
| Sentry | Developer plan, 1 user | $29 a month ($26 yearly) | Teams already using Sentry for errors |
1. Rectify
Rectify runs uptime monitoring as one part of a bigger job. Checks cover HTTP (with headers, body, keywords and assertions on the response), TCP ports, ping and DNS, plus heartbeats for cron jobs and daily SSL and domain expiry checks. A monitor can be marked degraded when it’s slow rather than down.
Alerts go to nine channels: email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, webhooks, PagerDuty, push, SMS, and a phone call where Quanta, Rectify’s AI teammate, reads the alert aloud. Escalation steps and quiet hours are built in. Incidents open on their own, Quanta drafts the update from the check history, and the status page on your own domain tells subscribers. Because support lives in the same workspace, the people asking “is it down?” can be pointed straight at the incident.
Price: 1 monitor on the free plan, 3 on Build ($29 a month), 10 on Launch ($59), 25 on Accelerate ($99), with support, feedback, the roadmap and the rest included. Monitors import from UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Pingdom or StatusCake.
Honest note: if you need hundreds of monitors and nothing else, a dedicated tool will be cheaper per check.
More on the uptime monitoring page, or see Rectify vs Better Stack.
2. UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is where many founders start. The free plan gives you 50 monitors with 5-minute checks and one status page, and is meant for hobby and non-profit projects. Paid plans (Solo, Team and Scale) bring checks down to 60, 30 and 15 seconds, more status pages and SMS and voice credits. Prices are shown in your local currency on its site.
Pick it if you want lots of straightforward checks for very little.
3. Better Stack
Better Stack is a full incident management suite: uptime checks as often as every 30 seconds, status pages, on-call scheduling with unlimited calls and SMS, plus logs, traces and error tracking. It’s free for personal projects with 10 monitors and a status page. A responder licence is $34 a month per on-call person, or $29 billed yearly; other team members are free.
Pick it if you have an engineering team that shares an on-call rota.
4. Checkly
Checkly is built for developers who want monitoring as code. Alongside uptime monitors, it runs API checks and real browser checks with Playwright. The free Hobby plan includes 10 uptime monitors at up to 2-minute frequency, 10,000 API check runs and 1,000 browser check runs a month. Starter is $24 a month billed yearly with 50 uptime monitors; on paid plans, status pages are priced separately, from $9 a month.
Pick it if you want to test full user journeys, like signing up and paying, every few minutes.
5. Cronitor
Cronitor started with cron jobs and does them very well, and it also covers heartbeats, websites and APIs. The free Hacker plan has 5 monitors, email and Slack alerts and a basic status page. Business is $2 a monitor and $5 a user a month, with checks every 30 seconds and SMS alerts; 20 monitors and 3 users comes to $55 a month.
Pick it if your product leans on scheduled jobs and you want to know the moment one doesn’t run.
6. Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the oldest names in uptime monitoring. Its synthetic monitoring is sold in tiers by number of uptime checks, from 10 upwards, with SMS alerts included, and it adds real user monitoring priced by pageviews. Prices come from a calculator on its site, and there’s a free trial.
Pick it if you want uptime and real user performance data from one long-standing vendor.
7. Sentry
If you already use Sentry for error monitoring, it includes one uptime monitor and cron monitoring. Team is $29 a month, or $26 billed yearly, with unlimited users.
Pick it if you only need to watch one URL and Sentry is already in your stack. See Rectify vs Sentry for the wider comparison.
How often should you check?
Every minute is plenty for most SaaS products. Five-minute checks are fine for side projects, but on a paid product they can mean five minutes of outage before you even know. Faster than 30 seconds rarely changes what you do about it. What matters more is checking the right things and getting the alert to someone who’ll act.
Questions founders ask
What is uptime monitoring?
A service that requests your website, API or other endpoints on a schedule from outside your servers, and alerts you when they stop responding, respond with an error or get slow. Most also run a status page to keep customers informed.
Do I need a status page?
Once you have paying customers, yes. It answers “is it down?” before anyone asks, keeps your support inbox quiet during an incident and shows customers you take reliability seriously.
Is free uptime monitoring good enough?
For a side project, usually. For a paid product, check the terms (UptimeRobot’s free plan is for hobby and non-profit use) and the check interval. Five minutes between checks is a long time when checkout is down.
Prices and features are taken from each company’s own pricing page: Rectify, UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Checkly, Cronitor, Pingdom and Sentry. Prices change, so check theirs before you decide.
Find out first
The best outage is the one you fixed before anyone noticed. Hire Rectify free and Quanta watches your product around the clock, and calls you when it matters.
