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."
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.
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?
I’m pretty confident that if they’d given 30 days you’d say that 45 days was the minimum.
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.
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.
WTF? I pay for my primary monitoring solution, among many other vendors I pay. You have no idea what you're talking about and are repeatedly coming across like a complete asshole for no discernible reason or provocation, so I'm not going to continue replying to you.
Why should people use just one tool all the time? There are many alternatives in this world, free as well.
A bit annoyed about this change though, I used to recommend folks looking for a ridiculous free tier use uptime robot instead.
https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma/issues/4885
So host it on a separate machine and don't put any secrets in there
I only use it to monitor the Uptime Kuma that monitors the rest of my homelab.