
Uptime Kuma
Self-hosted monitoring tool
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Jun 2026
Uptime Kuma monitors your websites, APIs, and services and notifies you immediately via Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or 90+ other channels when something goes down. Self-hosted, beautiful UI, dead simple setup.
MIT license. Install it with Docker in one command, add your URLs, set check intervals, and you're monitoring. The dashboard shows uptime percentages, response times, and certificate expiry. You can share public status pages with your users, like those "status.yourcompany.com" pages, but free.
Everything is free. No paid tier, no cloud version, no premium features. One developer (Louis Lam) built and maintains the entire thing. The community is massive and active.
The catch: Uptime Kuma monitors from one location, wherever you host it. If your server is in US-East and you're checking availability from there, you won't know about regional outages in Europe or Asia. Paid services like Better Stack or Pingdom check from multiple global locations. Also, if the server running Uptime Kuma goes down, your monitoring goes down with it. For production services, consider running it on a separate provider from what you're monitoring.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFully open source under MIT. No paid tier, no cloud offering, no premium features. Everything is included.
Self-hosted cost:
- Docker on a $5/mo VPS: handles monitoring hundreds of endpoints
- Resource usage is minimal: ~100MB RAM for a typical setup
- No database server needed; uses embedded SQLite
Compared to paid alternatives:
- Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime): starts at $24/mo for 20 monitors
- Pingdom: starts at $15/mo for 10 monitors
- UptimeRobot: free tier for 50 monitors (but no self-hosting, limited notifications)
Uptime Kuma gives you unlimited monitors for the cost of a small VPS.
Free. Unlimited monitors on a $5/mo VPS. Saves $200+/yr over paid alternatives.
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