When we first launched MyUpMonitor, we had a free tier: 5 monitors, 5-minute check intervals, email alerts. Standard stuff.

We removed it after a week. Here's why.

The economics didn't work

Every monitor costs us real money. Each check is an HTTP request from our infrastructure, stored in our database, potentially triggering alert delivery. At 5-minute intervals, that's 288 checks per monitor per day, or 1,440 for a free user with 5 monitors.

For a bootstrapped product targeting $10K MRR, giving away the most expensive part of the product for free doesn't make sense. We'd need thousands of free users to convert enough to paid plans, and we'd need infrastructure to serve them all.

Free tiers attract the wrong users

This isn't a judgement — it's a pattern. Free-tier users of monitoring tools tend to set up monitors and forget about them. They don't engage with alerts, don't create status pages, don't invite team members. The product becomes a commodity check box rather than a tool they rely on.

We'd rather have 100 customers who are invested in the product than 10,000 free users who barely notice it exists.

What we offer instead

Every paid plan — Pro ($15/mo), Business ($39/mo), and Enterprise ($99/mo) — comes with a 14-day free trial. No credit card required.

That's two weeks to set up monitors, configure alerts, create status pages, and see if it fits your workflow. If it works for you, you pay. If it doesn't, you just stop.

We think this is more honest than a free tier that exists mainly to inflate user counts. You get the full experience of the plan you're evaluating, not a crippled version that doesn't represent the real product.

We might be wrong

Maybe we'll add a free tier back someday. We're a new product and we're learning. But right now, we'd rather focus on building a great experience for the customers who trust us with their uptime monitoring.

If you have thoughts on this, we'd genuinely like to hear them: support@myupmonitor.com.