It's 3am. Does anyone know your site is down?
PingWhen fetches your URL on a schedule. When it fails twice in a row we send one alert: DOWN example.com since 03:12 UTC. When it answers again you get UP example.com after 41m. That's it: no incident timeline, no public status page, no team seats.
What counts as down
- Timeouts (10 seconds), DNS failures, TLS errors, and 5xx responses, after 2 consecutive failed checks.
- HTTP 408 and 425 count the same way. HTTP 429 (rate limited) only counts after 3 in a row, and we honor
Retry-After. - 401, 403 and 404 are not "down". They are errors: if one persists for 24 hours we email you once so you can fix the URL or the page.
Where alerts go
Email is the default. You can also use a US/CA phone number for SMS, or an HTTPS webhook that receives signed JSON ("event": "down" / "up"), which is handy for piping into a chat bot, a pager, or an AI agent that can go restart something.
Check intervals
Starter checks every 15 minutes, Plus every 5 minutes. If you need 30-second checks, multi-region confirmation, or TCP/ping monitors, a dedicated uptime service is a better fit, and we'd rather say so. PingWhen is for people who want a plain "it's down / it's back" message plus change alerts on the same URL.
Change detection included
Every watch can also alert when the page's text changes. That catches the failures uptime checks miss: the page that still returns 200 but now shows a maintenance or error message, or a deploy that wiped your pricing table.
Honest limits
- We watch the HTML we receive. Pages that only render their content with JavaScript (many single-page apps, some store stock widgets) are not supported: we would see an empty shell.
- We watch the whole page's text, not a CSS selector. Pages with rotating quotes, "5 minutes ago" labels, view counters or ads that change the text on every load will alert often. After a burst of alerts we pause that watch for 24 hours and email you a resume link.
- No logins, cookies, or pages behind a paywall. Public URLs on ports 80/443 only, up to 2 MB.
- No free plan. Cancel anytime in the Stripe customer portal.
Pricing
Starter $9/month: 10 URLs every 15 minutes. Plus $19/month: 40 URLs every 5 minutes. +10 URLs for $5/month.