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Free uptime monitoring for side projects

What you actually need to know when a side project goes down, without paying for enterprise monitoring.

If you run a side project on a cheap VPS or a free tier host, downtime still matters. Paying customers (or even friends using the tool) will notice before you do unless something is watching the URL.

What “good enough” looks like

You do not need Datadog. For most indie apps you need:

  1. A check every minute or so on the URL that matters
  2. An alert when it fails, and when it recovers
  3. Optionally a public status page so people stop DMing “is it down?”

That is the whole job.

Free options and the catch

Many free plans throttle you to 5-minute checks, or hide the status page behind a paid tier. Five minutes is a long time if checkout is broken. A free status page that actually ships with the free plan is rarer than marketing pages claim.

What to monitor first

  • Your marketing site or app homepage
  • The API health route if you have one (/api/health or similar)
  • A TCP check on a database port only if that port is reachable from the public internet (many are not, and should not be)

Skip vanity metrics. One or two monitors beat ten you ignore.

A simple setup with ReturnPod

ReturnPod gives you 5 monitors on the free plan at 1-minute intervals, email and webhook alerts, and one public status page. No card required.

  1. Sign up
  2. Add an HTTP monitor for your live URL
  3. Set an alert email
  4. Turn on the status page slug in settings if you want something public

If you later need Slack, Discord, heartbeats for cron, or a custom domain status page, that is what Pro is for. Start free until you feel the gap.

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