Downtime Monkey checks your website every 1-5 minutes and alerts you by email, Slack, or SMS when it goes down. Compare free and paid plans on Gappsy.
Downtime Monkey is a website and API monitoring service that works by sending periodic HTTP requests to a URL and checking whether the response is what's expected. If a site stops responding correctly, the service fires an alert to the account owner through email, Slack, or SMS, so problems get noticed before customers report them.
Founded in 2010, the service positions itself as a low-cost alternative to larger uptime monitoring platforms, running checks from monitoring locations in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Germany, and India depending on the plan. It's a straightforward, single-purpose tool rather than a broader observability suite.
The core function is uptime and response-time monitoring: Downtime Monkey polls a URL on a set interval, every 5 minutes on the free plan and down to every 1 minute on paid plans, and logs whether the request succeeded and how long it took to respond. Alerts can go out over email or Slack on any plan, with SMS alerts available as an add-on on paid tiers.
Paid plans add content monitoring, which checks a page for specific text and alerts if that text disappears, useful for catching broken pages that still return a success status, plus more detailed downtime logs that record the reason and duration of each outage, longer statistics history, and the ability to customize alert timing and repeat notifications.
Downtime Monkey's free plan supports up to 60 monitors checked every 5 minutes from a single UK-based location, with basic uptime and response-time statistics kept for 90 days and email or Slack alerts included. It has no bulk import, content monitoring, or SMS support.
Paid Pro plans scale by number of monitors, starting at roughly $0.69 per month on the low end up to around $56 per month for larger monitor counts, billed at lower rates annually. Paid plans check every 1 minute from six global locations, add content monitoring, custom and repeat alerts, free SMS credits, and two years of statistics history. Teams needing more than 1,000 monitors can request custom Enterprise pricing.
Yes, the free plan supports up to 60 monitors checked every 5 minutes with email and Slack alerts, and no credit card is required.
Pro plans are priced by monitor count, ranging from roughly $0.69 to $56 per month when billed annually, with custom Enterprise pricing above 1,000 monitors.
Email and Slack alerts are available on all plans, with SMS alerts available as an add-on on paid plans.
The free plan checks from a single UK location; paid plans check from up to six global locations.
It's a paid-plan feature that watches a page for specific text and alerts you if that text disappears, which can catch broken pages that still return a successful HTTP status.