If you only want the email
Full uptime platforms come with dashboards, status pages, integrations, team seats and many monitor types. Many people only want one thing: an email when a URL stops answering, and another when it's back. That's what PingWhen does, plus a text-change alert on the same URL. You paste the URL, choose where alerts go, pay once a month, and forget about it until something breaks.
Where UptimeRobot is stronger
UptimeRobot offers a free tier, shorter intervals on paid plans, and monitor types we don't have (ports, ping, keyword conditions, heartbeat/cron monitoring) along with public status pages. If you need any of those, it is the better tool. We're not trying to be a full monitoring platform.
Where PingWhen is different
- Change alerts on every watch. We hash the page's visible text, so you hear when a 200 OK page suddenly says "Service Unavailable" or your pricing table disappears.
- Webhooks included. Signed JSON with
event: down | up | changeon both plans. - Few moving parts. One form, one list, a Stripe billing link. Sign in with a magic link.
- Agents welcome.
POST /v1/watchesand /for-agents let an AI assistant set up monitoring and send you the checkout link.
Exact alert rules
- Down: 2 consecutive failures (timeout, DNS, TLS, 5xx, 408, 425). 429 needs 3. We honor Retry-After.
- 401/403/404 are "error", not down. If they persist 24 hours we email once.
- Up: only after we alerted down, with the outage duration.
- No more than one alert of the same kind per watch per 30 minutes.
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. No free plan and no annual lock-in; cancel anytime.