StatusCake alternative: one monitor pool instead of five

What StatusCake does well

The free plan is the headline and it is genuinely good. Ten uptime monitors at five minute intervals, plus an SSL monitor, a domain expiry monitor, and a page speed monitor, at no cost. Very few services hand you certificate and domain monitoring on a free account.

• A free tier that includes SSL, domain expiry, and page speed monitoring rather than reserving them for paid plans.
• Domain expiry monitoring specifically, which catches the outage nobody sees coming: the registration lapsing rather than the certificate.
• Page speed monitoring built in, useful when the complaint is "the site feels slow" rather than "the site is down".
• Server monitoring agents on the paid tiers for CPU, memory, and disk on your own boxes.
• Very fast intervals on the higher tier, down to thirty seconds.
• High monitor ceilings on the upper plans, in the hundreds, if scale is what you need.
• White-label and templated reporting on the higher tiers, which agencies reporting to clients tend to like.

If the free tier covers you, it covers you well, and there is no reason to switch for the sake of it.

Where it starts to hurt

• Monitors are quota-ed by type. Uptime, page speed, domain, SSL, and server monitors each have their own cap per plan, so you can be simultaneously at your SSL limit and nowhere near your uptime limit.
• The free tier is a single team member. Adding a second person means a paid plan.
• Team seats are capped per tier rather than unlimited, so a growing team is a tier upgrade rather than an invite.
• SMS arrives as a monthly credit allowance, which is fine until an incident chews through it.
• The step between the free plan and the first paid plan is a large jump in both price and capability, with little in between.

Side by side

Where Undownable differs

• One monitor pool. A monitor is a monitor whether it checks HTTP, a keyword, a JSON field, a TCP port, ping, DNS, an SSL certificate, or a heartbeat. Ten on Free and fifty on Pro, spend them however you like.
• Unlimited team members on Pro at no extra cost, so inviting a colleague is not a billing decision.
• Every alert channel on every plan including free: email, ntfy, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and webhooks, none of them metered.
• First class ntfy support including self-hosted ntfy servers with access tokens, which is unusual among hosted monitors.
• SSL checks that verify the full chain and the hostname, not only expiry, with escalating warnings at 30, 14, 7, and 1 days out and an all-clear once renewed.
• A degraded state distinct from down, so a certificate with nine days left is visible and alerted without damaging your uptime figure.
• Exactly-once alert delivery, flap suppression, and confirmation thresholds so one failed check never pages anybody.
• JSON API checks with dot-notation assertions into the response body.
• Push heartbeats for cron jobs, backups, and self-hosted monitoring boxes, sharing the same alert routing.
• A first-party MCP server alongside the REST API, with least-privilege tokens pinnable to one team.
• Unlimited status pages on Pro, each with its own custom domain, and 365 days of history.

Who should stick with StatusCake

• You need domain expiry monitoring. Undownable watches certificates thoroughly but does not track domain registration expiry, and StatusCake does.
• You need page speed monitoring or server agents reporting CPU, memory, and disk from inside your machines.
• You need hundreds of monitors. Undownable Pro tops out at fifty and StatusCake goes considerably higher.
• You need sub-minute intervals; their higher tier reaches thirty seconds.
• You want white-label client reporting as a built-in feature.
• You need SMS alerting, which Undownable does not provide.