← All guides

Freshping is gone. What it got right, and where to go now

Updated 26 August 2026 · by Cassian Wei · 3 min read

Freshping was quietly one of the best free deals in monitoring: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, five public status pages, checks from ten global locations, room for a whole team — for $0. Then Freshworks discontinued it: free accounts stopped on March 6, 2026, and the 90-day export window closed in early June. The service, and any data you didn't export, is gone.

The trap in most "Freshping alternative" lists

Most migration articles route you to whichever free tier has the biggest monitor count — and skip the detail that made Freshping unusual: check frequency. Freshping probed every minute. The default suggestion, UptimeRobot's (genuinely good) free plan, checks every 5 minutes — so an outage can burn several minutes before the first failed probe even fires, and short blips between probes are simply never seen. If 1-minute detection is part of what you were relying on, a 5-minute tier isn't a replacement — it's a downgrade that happens to be free. (If 5-minute checks are fine for you, UptimeRobot free is a solid home: 50 monitors, commercial use allowed — see our honest UptimeRobot guide.)

What Watchpup covers of the Freshping shape

Watchpup's free tier is built around the same two things Freshping users actually used: 60-second checks and public status pages (with your branding, visitor email subscriptions, and embeddable widgets). On top of that, things Freshping never had: TLS-certificate expiry, domain expiry and DNS record monitoring, cron-job heartbeats with real cron expressions and timezones, TCP port checks, 🐢 slow-response alerts, and alerts to email, signed webhooks, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, ntfy push or Telegram. Team logins (up to 10) and an API/CLI/MCP for everything. No card, no trial clock.

Where it doesn't match Freshping — honestly

  • Monitor count: 15 free vs Freshping's 50. If you genuinely used all 50, no single free tier replaces that at 1-minute intervals; the practical answer is below.
  • Multi-location probes. Freshping checked from 10 selectable locations; Watchpup checks from one global edge network. You get low-latency probes but not per-region verification.
  • SMS alerts. Freshping's free SMS is not something we offer — phone push goes via ntfy or Telegram instead (both free).
  • Team size: 10 vs Freshping's 30 logins.

Rebuilding your monitors: one API call

Freshping's API died with the service, so there's nothing left to import from — but if you have your old URL list (from a pre-shutdown export, your bookmarks, or memory), you can recreate everything in a single bulk call instead of clicking through a form 15 times:

curl -X POST https://watchpup.watchpup.workers.dev/api/monitors/bulk \
  -H 'authorization: Bearer wp_...' -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '[{"kind":"http","name":"site","url":"https://example.com"},
       {"kind":"http","name":"api","url":"https://api.example.com/health"},
       {"kind":"tcp","name":"db","target":"db.example.com:5432"}]'
# → per-item results; re-running skips monitors you already have

Had more than 15? Put the critical ones here at 60-second resolution and park the long tail on a 5-minute free tier elsewhere — two vendors is also genuinely better monitoring than one (no single point of failure watching your stack).

The real lesson: free tiers from big SaaS get killed

Freshping monitored tens of thousands of sites and was still shut down — free side-products at large SaaS companies live at the mercy of portfolio reviews. Some due diligence worth doing on any free monitoring tier, ours included:

  • Is free the product, or a lead magnet? A free tier that exists to upsell an enterprise suite disappears when the funnel math changes.
  • Can you leave in an afternoon? Check for data export before you need it. Watchpup gives every account one-command CSV export of all check history, any time — not just during a shutdown window.
  • What do the terms promise? Ours commit in writing to grandfathering existing free accounts if paid plans ever appear, and to an export window of at least 180 days if the product ever winds down. Freshping's users got 90 days; we think that's the floor, not the standard.
  • Would you notice the shutdown email? Freshping's sunset was announced months ahead — plenty of users still discovered it when their monitors went dark. Whatever you pick, send its announcement address somewhere you read.

Watchpup is a young product in beta, run in the open — judge it by the live demo status page, the changelog, and a free-tier comparison we keep factually current.

Watchpup is free uptime & cron monitoring — 1-minute checks, heartbeats, TLS/domain expiry, status pages, alerts everywhere. Sign up, try the live demo, or read more guides.