Honeybadger is a bootstrapped error and uptime monitoring tool for Rails, Elixir, PHP and Python. Compare its free, Team and Business pricing plans.
Honeybadger began in 2012 when developers Ben Curtis, Josh Wood and Starr Horne grew fed up with their existing error-tracking tool, Airbrake, after it was acquired and service quality declined while prices rose. They built their own alternative and launched with paying customers that same year, choosing to stay self-funded and bootstrapped ever since rather than take venture capital.
The company remains small and distributed, based out of Kirkland, Washington, with a team of roughly 30 people. Its product bundles error tracking, uptime monitoring and scheduled job check-ins into one dashboard, aimed squarely at developers who want fast, no-nonsense visibility into production issues without a heavyweight enterprise observability platform.
Exception monitoring captures unhandled errors with full stack traces, request context and breadcrumbs, and ties them back to specific deploys so teams can see exactly which release introduced a regression. SDKs cover Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, PHP, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Go and Java, among others.
Uptime Monitoring checks URLs and services on a schedule and alerts on downtime, while Check-Ins verify that scheduled background jobs and cron tasks actually fired, catching silent failures that error tracking alone would miss. Alerts route through Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, email and webhooks, and an Insights feature adds structured log search on top.
Honeybadger's Developer plan is free forever and covers 5,000 errors per month, 1 monitor and 1 status page for a single user, making it usable for side projects and very small apps. Paid Team and Business plans raise the quota to 50,000 errors per month and unlock unlimited users.
Team costs 26 dollars per month, or 286 dollars billed annually, while Business costs 80 dollars per month, or 880 dollars annually, and adds longer data retention, unlimited teams, SSO and anomaly detection for compliance-conscious organizations. Usage beyond plan quotas is billed per notification, and custom enterprise pricing is available for larger volumes.
Yes, the Developer plan is free forever and includes 5,000 errors per month, 1 monitor, 1 status page and 15-day retention for a single user.
Paid plans start at 26 dollars per month for Team (50,000 errors/month, unlimited users) and 80 dollars per month for Business, which adds SSO, anomaly detection and longer retention. Annual billing is discounted.
Honeybadger provides SDKs for Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, PHP, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Go, Java and several other languages and frameworks.
No, Honeybadger has been self-funded and bootstrapped since it was founded in 2012, with no outside venture capital investment.
Yes, in addition to exception monitoring, Honeybadger includes Uptime Monitoring for checking service availability and Check-Ins for verifying scheduled jobs and cron tasks actually ran.
Common alternatives include Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag and Airbrake for error tracking, plus Better Uptime, Pingdom or UptimeRobot for uptime checks, and Honeycomb or Datadog for teams needing broader observability.