Affordable website monitoring: free for one site, $2 a month for three
Most small websites need the same four things from monitoring: a check every minute, an alert only when the site is really down, a warning before the certificate or the domain expires, and a price that is lower than the website itself costs. KeenCrow does those four things and little else, which is why it costs $2 a month.
What $2 a month buys
- 3 websites, checked every minute. Availability, DNS and the security certificate, from a server in the United States.
- Alerts that are confirmed first. One failed check never alerts. Three in a row open an incident and send one email; one more email says the site is back.
- Expiry warnings. 7, 3 and 1 days before a certificate expires, and 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days before the domain registration expires.
- A dashboard and 90 days of history. Uptime for 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, response times and every incident.
- Two alert addresses. Yours and a teammate who confirms theirs.
- A public status page. Switch it on in one click and share the link, or embed the uptime badge on your own site.
Plus ($5) and Pro ($10) add more websites, longer history, more alert addresses, alerts to Slack and Discord, step-by-step incident reports, a check that a phrase is present on the page, and monitoring of cron jobs and backups.
Why it can be this cheap
- The checks are ordinary, predictable software with no AI in the loop, so they cost almost nothing to run.
- There is one check location instead of a dozen. For a small site, one well-behaved location that confirms before it alerts is what you need.
- There is no sales team, no ads and no tracking. The price is on the pricing page and that is the whole price.
- Payments go through Stripe, so there is no billing department to pay for.
Who it is for
People who run a few websites and want to hear about problems before their customers do: small businesses, freelancers and agencies with a handful of client sites, side projects, personal blogs, and the people who host a game server or a backup job for a community. If you need checks from several continents, SMS alerts or a phone call at 3am, you need a larger service and will pay accordingly.
Try it before paying anything
Run one free check of any website with no account, then put one website on the free plan with no card. When you want checks every minute, more websites or Slack and Discord alerts, Starter is $2 a month and can be tried free for 10 days.