Most "free" monitoring is a trial wearing a free badge. You get the good features for fourteen days, or the free plan checks so rarely, from a single location, that you would be foolish to trust it with anything you actually care about. The free tier exists to make the upgrade button look reasonable, not to monitor your site.
We built the Tallwatch free plan to be the opposite of that. It is meant to run a real side project, not to start a countdown.
What free actually includes
No credit card, no trial clock:
- 10 monitors, each with full multi-region consensus.
- Checks every minute from three regions, so a single network blip never pages you.
- On-call rotations and escalation, so the right person gets the alert.
- One status page on your own custom domain.
- Email and Slack alerts.
- Up to three team members.
The first line is the one that matters. Multi-region consensus, the feature that makes an alert worth trusting, is not held back for paying customers. It is the entire point of the product, and charging extra for the thing that makes it work would be a strange way to earn your trust.
Why give that away
Because a free tier should answer one honest question: can I run something I care about on this without getting burned? If the real answer is "only for two weeks" or "only if you do not mind the occasional false alarm at 3am," then it is a marketing funnel, not a free tier, and developers can smell the difference instantly.
Most of us have a side project or two that quietly matters. A personal API a few friends depend on. A small product that pays part of a bill. Those deserve real monitoring, not a nag screen counting down to a card form.
When it is time to pay
Free is genuinely enough to run a small production project. You will feel the ceiling when you start wanting the things teams need at scale:
- More than 10 monitors, or more than three teammates.
- Faster checks, and the ability to tune the consensus rule yourself.
- The full set of seven channels, including Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Discord, PagerDuty, and signed webhooks.
- Webhook payloads you shape yourself, to route incidents into your own tooling.
- More than one status page.
Until you hit one of those, the free plan is not a tease. It is the same product, with smaller numbers.
And because developers have been burned by free tiers that quietly turn into trials, we put ours in writing with a date attached. You should be able to build on a free plan without wondering when the rug gets pulled.