Free Uptime Monitoring and Error Tracking in 2026: 10 Free Plans

Free uptime monitoring in 2026 is easy to find: all ten error tracking, uptime and observability services checked here publish a free plan, and none is trial only. The free plans differ in what they count and how often they check, such as UptimeRobot's "50 monitors" at a "5 min. monitoring interval" (UptimeRobot pricing), Checkly's "10 Uptime Monitors" at "Maximum Frequency 2 Min." (Checkly pricing) and Sentry's "Error Monitoring 5k errors" (Sentry pricing). Every figure here comes from the ZeroRaised monitoring tiers dataset or the vendor pages it cites, all checked on 22 Oct 2026.

Disclosure: ZeroRaised publishes this guide and the monitoring tiers dataset it draws on, and appears in the final section. Every limit, price and quote below comes from that dataset or the vendor pages it cites, and the dataset was built only from each vendor's own pricing, docs and terms pages, and each vendor fact links to the page it came from. Where the dataset says a value is not stated, so does this guide. ZeroRaised has no affiliate deal with any company named here.

TL;DR#

Free error tracking, uptime monitoring and observability plans for indie products, from each vendor's own pages, checked 22 Oct 2026:

For a small product, what the plan counts, how often it checks, who can log in and how long data stays usually matter more than the headline cap.

What the monitoring tiers dataset found, checked 22 Oct 2026#

On 22 October 2026, ZeroRaised checked the free plans of 10 error tracking, uptime monitoring and observability services that indie developers often use and published the results as the monitoring tiers dataset. It records the free plan, the cap in the vendor's own unit, check interval, seats, retention, commercial use, card requirement and any self-hosted option.

Three findings matter most:

• All ten publish a free plan. No vendor in the set is trial only. Rollbar and BugSnag also offer trials of paid features, which is a separate thing.
• The units do not match. Errors, exceptions, occurrences, events, monitors, jobs, active series and gigabytes. Nothing is converted.
• Commercial use is stated by one vendor. UptimeRobot says in its terms that commercial use is fine. Others describe who the plan is for, which is not a rule.

The dated event is the check itself: the dataset records each free plan as its vendor published it on 22 October 2026.

Free uptime monitoring and error tracking compared: all 10 vendors#

The full dataset, with values as each vendor writes them. "not stated" means the pages checked did not state the value; it does not mean "included", "not included", "allowed" or "not allowed".

Two cells need care. Which of Sentry's documented intervals the free plan allows is not stated, so the table does not pick one. And UptimeRobot's "3 months" is how long it keeps logs, including response times (UptimeRobot pricing); it is not an error retention figure.

The columns are not a league table. An error cap, a monitor count and a gigabyte allowance describe different things.

Errors, exceptions, occurrences and events: why the caps do not line up#

The error caps look like they sit on one scale. They do not, because each vendor decides what it counts.

Two details catch people. BugSnag counts handled exceptions too, if you choose to report them (BugSnag pricing), so an app that logs every caught error through the SDK uses its allowance faster than its crash count suggests. And Rollbar pairs its occurrence cap with sessions (Rollbar pricing).

Sentry's "5k errors" (Sentry pricing) and Better Stack's "100,000 exceptions per month" (Better Stack pricing) are not the same kind of figure, and nothing on these pages converts one into the other. To compare two vendors honestly, count what your own app throws in a normal month, then read each vendor's rule against that number.

Uptime figures have the same problem. A monitor count is how many endpoints you can watch, a check interval is how long an outage can run before a check sees it, and a run count, as Checkly and Grafana Cloud use, caps how many checks execute in a month. The dataset keeps the three apart.

Free uptime monitoring plans: UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Checkly and Healthchecks.io#

These four free plans centre on checking that something is up. Three poll your site or API; Healthchecks.io waits for your jobs to report in.

UptimeRobot. The free plan is shown as "Free € 0 /month" with "No credit card required!" (UptimeRobot pricing). The page showed prices in euros when the dataset was checked, so they stay in euros here, unconverted. Beside the monitors and interval in the table, it lists "Only 5 integrations" and "Notify seats unavailable No login seats available", so there are no extra seats for anyone else on the free plan. SSL checks sit outside it by the vendor's own words: "SSL monitoring is included only in paid plans." The status page is limited too, with "1 status page with a unique UptimeRobot URL only" (UptimeRobot terms), so no custom domain on free.

Better Stack. Better Stack's uptime page offers "10 monitors, 10 heartbeats and a status page with 3-minute checks totally free." (Better Stack uptime). The free plan on its pricing page, "Free for personal projects $0 per month", also lists "100,000 exceptions per month", "5,000 session replays" and "3 GB logs retained for 3 days" (Better Stack pricing). Seats, card requirement and self-hosting are not stated.

Checkly. Checkly's Hobby plan is "$ 0 per month" and the vendor says "By signing up for the Hobby plan, you get access to almost all of Checkly's features." (Checkly pricing). Beside "10 Uptime Monitors" you can "execute up to 10,000 API and 1,000 Browser Check runs per month". One team member can access the account, and "You do not need a credit card to get started."

Healthchecks.io. Healthchecks.io works the other way round: your cron job pings it, and you get an alert when a ping does not arrive. The Hobbyist plan is "$0 / month" with "Monitor 20 jobs" and "100 log entries per job" (Healthchecks.io pricing). When the log is full, "the oldest log entries are removed". The vendor asks you not to "use multiple accounts to get around the limits of the Hobbyist plan", and offers "the Business plan free of charge for open-source projects and nonprofits."

A polling monitor tells you the site responds; a heartbeat monitor tells you a backup or worker actually ran. Plenty of small products need both.

Free error tracking plans: Sentry, Honeybadger, Rollbar and BugSnag#

These four sell error tracking first. Sentry and Honeybadger add a little uptime monitoring to the free plan; Rollbar and BugSnag list none.

Sentry. The Developer plan is "For solo devs working on small projects" and is "Free $0", "Limited to one user" (Sentry pricing). Beside "Error Monitoring 5k errors" it lists "Tracing 5M spans", "Logs 5GB", one uptime monitor and one cron monitor, with "Projects Unlimited". New accounts also get a time-limited extra: "New users only: Get 5,000 free replays per month for your first 3 months." The uptime docs list check intervals from "1 minute" to "1 hour" (Sentry uptime docs); the free plan's interval is not stated. Sentry also publishes a self-host route. Its developer docs describe "How you can run all of Sentry on your own server, without paying anything." (Sentry self-hosted docs).

Honeybadger. Honeybadger's Developer plan is "$0 /mo Free forever" (Honeybadger plans), and the vendor says "Our free Developer plan is great for new apps, side projects, and developers working solo." It lists "5,000 errors/mo", logging at "50 MB/day", "1 monitor" checked every "5 minutes", and "1 status page". Users are capped at 1 and projects are "Unlimited". Error data is kept "15 days" and log data "7 days". Self-hosting is a sales conversation, not a download: "Ask us about High-volume pricing Single-tenant or self-hosted deployments".

Rollbar. Rollbar's free plan is "$0 monthly" with "5K occurrences + 1K sessions", which the compare table spells out as "Included occurrences 5,000 / month" (Rollbar pricing). Retention is "Maximum data retention 30 days" in the Free column, and the plan has "Included credits 0". Seats on Free are not stated: the compare table lists "Unlimited users" without a per-plan value. Rollbar also offers a trial of its paid features: "Evaluate the complete Advanced feature-set with 200K occurrences, 10K replays, and 15K credits."

BugSnag. BugSnag's free plan is for "Solo users and their passion projects" at "$0 /month" (BugSnag pricing). It "Includes: 1 user" and "7.5K events and 1M spans per month", and "Our Free tier includes 7 days of data retention". The free plan's own project limit is not stated, and on-premises deployment appears only on the top plan. Its pricing FAQ asks "How does the 14-day free trial work?", and the answer is not recorded in the dataset.

Seven days of error history is enough to fix what broke this week, not to spot an error that returns a month later. Read the retention line before the cap: Sentry lists a "30-day lookback" (Sentry pricing), Rollbar a 30-day maximum (Rollbar pricing) and Honeybadger 15 days for error data (Honeybadger plans).

Observability platforms with free plans: Axiom and Grafana Cloud#

These two are not error trackers or uptime checkers first. They store and query logs, metrics and traces, and you build alerts on top. Their free plans are measured in data, not in errors or monitors.

Axiom. Axiom calls itself "The modern machine data platform." (Axiom pricing). The Personal plan is "For individual developers and small projects." at "$0 / month Permanent. No credit card required." It lists "500 GB/mo data loading compute", "10 GB-hours query compute", "25 GB storage" and "30-day retention". Alerting is included on Personal ("Alerting Yes Yes"). Seats, check intervals, commercial use and self-hosting are not stated.

Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud's free tier is "Always free Always $0" and "Perfect for personal projects, exploring new ideas, and early-stage startups." (Grafana Cloud pricing). It includes "All Grafana Cloud services, with usage limits" and "Community support". The limits are per signal: metrics are "Limited to 10k active series per month"; logs, traces and profiles are "Limited to 50 GB ingested per month"; synthetic checks are "Limited to 100k API test executions & 10k browser test executions per month". Retention is "14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests", and "No credit card required". Grafana itself can be run on your own servers: Grafana says you can "run on your own infrastructure with self-managed options." (Grafana OSS).

Grafana's synthetic checks are counted in test executions, not monitors, so that figure does not sit beside UptimeRobot's or Checkly's as a like-for-like number.

The small print on free uptime monitoring plans#

The cap is rarely what moves a small product to a paid plan. Four patterns matter more.

Commercial use. Only one vendor states it. UptimeRobot's terms say "UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use." (UptimeRobot terms), while the free card on its pricing page says "Good for hobby and non-profit projects." (UptimeRobot pricing). The others describe who the plan is for without saying what is allowed:

"not stated" is not the same as allowed. Honeybadger mentions "serious production apps" and the Healthchecks.io FAQ discusses work accounts (Healthchecks.io FAQ), but neither says commercial use is permitted. If you charge for your product, read the terms page of the tool you pick.

Seats. Sentry is "Limited to one user" (Sentry pricing), BugSnag "Includes: 1 user", Honeybadger lists 1 for "How many people can work on your projects together", Checkly 1 team member, and UptimeRobot says "No login seats available". If a co-founder needs to see alerts, check how each tool notifies people without a seat.

Retention. Free plans keep data for short windows, measured against different things. Better Stack keeps "3 GB logs retained for 3 days" (Better Stack pricing), BugSnag "7 days of data retention" (BugSnag pricing), Honeybadger error data "15 days" (Honeybadger plans) and Axiom "30-day retention" (Axiom pricing). Healthchecks.io's limit is "100 log entries per job" (Healthchecks.io pricing), a count rather than a length of time, so how far back it reaches depends on how often each job runs.

Self-hosting. Three vendors publish a self-hosted route: Sentry (Sentry self-hosted docs), Grafana (Grafana OSS) and Healthchecks.io (Healthchecks.io self-hosted docs). Honeybadger lists it as a sales enquiry and BugSnag on its top plan only. For the other five, a self-hosted option is not stated. A monitor that runs on the same server as your app goes down with it, so if you self-host, host the monitor somewhere else.

A launch is when all of this bites. More visitors can mean more errors against a monthly cap, and a slow interval can miss a short outage. The traffic spikes guide covers what else to check before launch day.

How to choose free uptime monitoring and error tracking for a small product#

The dataset does not rank vendors. These questions sort the options for a particular product.

Do you need to know the site is up, or why it broke? Uptime checks answer the first question and error tracking the second. Sentry, Honeybadger and Better Stack put some of both on the free plan; the others lead with one of the two.

How long can an outage run before you hear about it? That is the check interval, not the monitor count. Read it on the free plan itself, because the figure a vendor advertises for its product may belong to a paid plan. Better Stack's free offer, for example, reads "3-minute checks" (Better Stack uptime), and the intervals on its paid plans are not recorded in the dataset.

Do you have scheduled jobs? Backups and email runs fail quietly. A heartbeat monitor, such as Healthchecks.io's jobs, Sentry's cron monitor or Better Stack's heartbeats, catches a job that never ran.

What does the next step cost? Know the next paid plan as the vendor shows it before you need it.

The rows mix flat monthly fees, annual billing and usage pricing, so they are not a price comparison.

What will you watch in the first month? Usually the home page, the sign-up or checkout path, and any job that sends email or takes payment. The launch checklist for bootstrapped makers puts monitoring in order with everything else to set up before launch, and the vibe coded app security checklist covers launch-day response.

Where ZeroRaised fits#

Monitoring is how you find out a launch broke something before your users tell you. ZeroRaised keeps the monitoring tiers dataset for that reason: 10 free plans, every figure linked to the vendor's own page, with a check date and a CSV download. The ZeroRaised data hub lists it with the other datasets, including the free hosting and database tiers, the free auth and login tiers and the free analytics tiers. If a vendor's page has changed since 22 Oct 2026, the vendor's page wins.

ZeroRaised is a free launch site for bootstrapped makers whose products have no institutional VC or accelerator equity. Once your alerts are in place and you would hear about an outage before your visitors do, you can submit your product for review. The maker perks page lists separate offers for eligible makers, some of which cut running costs.

So, free uptime monitoring and error tracking in one line: all ten vendors checked publish a free plan, but they count in different units, check at different intervals and keep data for different lengths of time, so match the small print to your product before the headline number.