← All guides

A free StatusCake alternative with 1-minute checks (and where StatusCake still wins)

Updated 26 August 2026 · by Cassian Wei · 4 min read

StatusCake has run a real free plan for over a decade — rare in this genre — and before looking at alternatives you should know what it's actually good at. This guide starts there, because most "StatusCake alternative" posts don't: they list ten competitors and skip what you'd be giving up.

What StatusCake's free plan gets right

  • Free heartbeat monitoring. Push tests (their name for dead-man's-switch cron monitoring) are included on every plan, free included. Almost no big uptime service does this — UptimeRobot sells it, Pingdom doesn't have it. Credit where due.
  • 10 uptime monitors at $0, commercial use, no card.
  • A taste of everything: the free plan includes 1 SSL check, 1 domain check and even 1 page-speed check — enough to evaluate each product area.
  • Track record and tooling: a stable REST API, a Terraform provider, 15+ alert integrations.

Where the free plan pinches

Two patterns push people off it (both from StatusCake's own pricing page, checked August 2026):

  • The 5-minute interval. Free uptime checks run every 5 minutes; 1-minute intervals start on Superior at ~$20.41/month billed annually (~$24.49 monthly), and 30-second checks are Business at ~$66.66/month. A 5-minute cadence means a short outage can come and go entirely between checks, and even a long one is ~2.5 minutes old on average before the first failed probe — the Freshping post-mortem covers why people who've had 1-minute checks won't go back.
  • The "1 of each" caps. One SSL monitor (checked every 24 h) and one domain monitor (checked every 7 days) is fine for one website. The moment you run two certificates — an API subdomain, a staging box, a client's site — the free plan literally cannot watch the second one.

The free tier built the other way around

Watchpup's free tier inverts those two decisions: 15 monitors, every one at 60-second intervals, and monitor kinds are just kinds — you can make all 15 of them TLS-expiry checks (daily, with a configurable warning window) or domain-expiry checks (daily, not weekly) if that's what your estate needs. HTTP checks get keyword and JSON-body assertions, custom headers/methods, and 🐢 slow-response alerts with latency percentiles. Heartbeat monitors take real cron expressions with timezones, grace windows, /start–/fail run tracking and ping-by-email. Public status pages with visitor email subscriptions and embeddable widgets are included, and everything is driveable by API, CLI or MCP. Alerts go to email, signed webhooks, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, ntfy push and Telegram — with delivery retries and per-monitor routing.

Where StatusCake still wins — honestly

  • Page-speed monitoring. We don't have it at all. If you want scheduled page-load performance reports, StatusCake's free plan gives you one daily check and paid plans go much further.
  • Server monitoring. Agent-based CPU/RAM/disk monitoring is a paid StatusCake feature; we deliberately only monitor from the outside.
  • Multi-location probes. Paid StatusCake plans let you pick probe locations around the world. Watchpup checks from one global edge network — resilient, but no per-region "is it down in Asia?" view.
  • Domain blacklist monitoring, SMS credits, team seats — all real StatusCake paid features with no Watchpup equivalent (phone push here goes via ntfy or Telegram, free but app-based).
  • Scale: 100–300 monitors on paid plans vs our flat 15. And a decade-plus of operating history vs a product in beta — our answer is a public changelog, a live demo, and terms that commit to grandfathering and a 180-day export window, but history is history.

One thing to know if you go paid there: StatusCake subscriptions auto-renew, and their pricing FAQ says cancellation should happen at least 70 days before the renewal date (clause 8 of their terms). Not a criticism — just calendar it.

Migrating: their API on the way out

StatusCake's v1 API makes trying an alternative low-risk — export your uptime checks with your API token, eyeball the list, and re-create the HTTP ones in a single bulk call:

# 1. export your uptime checks from StatusCake
curl -s -H 'authorization: Bearer STATUSCAKE_TOKEN' \
  'https://api.statuscake.com/v1/uptime' | \
  python3 -c 'import json,sys
cs=json.load(sys.stdin)["data"]
print(json.dumps([{"kind":"http","name":c["name"],"url":c["website_url"]}
  for c in cs if c["test_type"]=="HTTP"]))' > monitors.json

# 2. import into Watchpup (re-runs skip monitors you already have)
curl -X POST https://watchpup.watchpup.workers.dev/api/monitors/bulk \
  -H 'authorization: Bearer wp_...' -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d @monitors.json

Notes: the list is paginated (add ?page=2 if you have more than a page of checks), and free StatusCake accounts have tighter API rate limits. TCP checks keep their host in website_url with the port in a separate field — map them to Watchpup's {"kind":"tcp","target":"host:port"} by hand. Push/heartbeat tests can't be imported (the ping URL necessarily changes): re-create them as heartbeat monitors and update the ping URL in your crontab.

Or run both

As with UptimeRobot, the honest recommendation is often both free tiers: keep StatusCake for its free heartbeats and the page-speed check, put your latency-sensitive URLs on 60-second checks here, and let each service monitor the other's status page. Two independent free monitors beat one of anything.

Pricing and feature claims checked against StatusCake's own pricing page, knowledge base and API docs, August 2026. Trademarks belong to their owners; no affiliation. Spot an error? Tell me — corrections ship same-day.

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.