Is Pingdom free? What it actually costs in 2026
Pingdom has no free plan: a free trial, then Synthetic Monitoring from $16.50 a month ($198 a year for 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check and 50 SMS alerts) and Real User Monitoring from $16.50 a month for 100,000 page views.
The pricing page is a subscription calculator — pick a synthetic tier and a RUM tier; the smallest of each is $198 a year, $396 for both. The trial includes Synthetics and RUM. Enterprise (500K to 5M+ page views) is quoted.
What the free tier actually includes
- No free tier; free trial only
- Smallest synthetic tier: 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS alerts
- Smallest RUM tier: 100,000 page views a month
Where the wall is
The eleventh uptime check. Ten checks covers a couple of services; a team with a dozen endpoints is on the 25-check tier, and the calculator scales in steps, not per check — which is the comparison with an open uptime monitor that charges nothing per check.
After that: Synthetic Monitoring from $16.50 a month (annual, $198 a year at 10 uptime checks); Real User Monitoring from $16.50 a month (100,000 page views); both together from $396 a year; Enterprise by quote.
Can you self-host Pingdom? No — cloud only
Pingdom is hosted only. Uptime Kuma and Gatus are the self-hosted uptime monitors compared here; UptimeRobot is the hosted alternative with a free tier.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting Uptime Kuma
Self-hosting Gatus
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you need real-user monitoring alongside uptime — knowing that Brazilian users see a four-second load while everyone else sees one second is a different product from knowing the site is up, and none of the open tools do it. Stay if you are already inside SolarWinds observability and one vendor, one invoice and one support contract has real value. Stay if you need enterprise SLAs and audit trails on the monitoring itself, which some regulated environments require. And stay if global multi-region checking is the requirement, because a self-hosted monitor on one box cannot replicate it.
What you are locked into
Low, and this is a category where that is genuinely true. Monitors are URLs and thresholds — recreating them elsewhere is an afternoon at most. Historical uptime data does not export in a form anything else ingests, so you lose the record rather than move it, and status-page subscribers have to be re-collected. Neither is a reason to stay; both are reasons to switch sooner rather than later, because the data you lose grows every month you wait.
If you would rather not pay: Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma
The self-hosted monitor that beat the paid ones on features.
Free and open source. One Docker container on a server you already run.
See all 5 Pingdom alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from SolarWinds's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-27 — 33 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.