Paying to Ping? We Switched to Uptime Kuma and Saved Big

Introduction

We used to rely on Pingdom for uptime monitoring. It worked well with simple checks, nice UI, and reliable and clean alerts. But one day, someone on our DevOps team casually said:

“Hey, why are we paying for something that only pings URLs?”

And that kicked off a big conversation.

The Cost Wake-Up

Pingdom wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t cheap either — especially when:

• You’re monitoring 20+ services across staging, QA, integration, and prod 
• You want multiple checks per minute
• You want more than one team member/channel to get alerts
• You want status pages and integrations

Our bill kept growing. And worse — we were hitting limits.

Enter Uptime Kuma

Someone suggested Uptime Kuma — an open-source monitoring tool that looked like a side project at first. But then we tried it. And wow. It was exactly what we needed.

Uptime Kuma

What We Did

We spun up Kuma on a small EC2 instance (t4g.micro — super cheap) and started setting up monitors:

• HTTP/HTTPS URLs for APIs, websites, and Jenkins
• TCP checks for internal services
• Ping checks for critical IPs
• Custom alerts to Microsoft Teams & Telegram
• MySQL Databases
• Kafka Producers
  

  Monitoring With Uptime Kuma

Within an hour, we had replaced 100% of our Pingdom setup.

What We Loved Instantly

• Unlimited monitors — no pricing tiers
• 1-second interval checks (Pingdom doesn’t go that fast unless you pay more)
• Beautiful UI — honestly, better than expected
• Built-in public status pages — no extra tools required
• Custom alert integrations — via webhooks, email, Slack, Telegram, etc.
• Simple & beautiful status pages.
• It can monitor everything from simple HTTP Endpoints to tiny Docker containers.
  

  Monitor Types

Real-World Benefits

1. More Control: We control how often things are checked, where they run, and who gets notified — no vendor lock-in.

2. Cost Savings: We went from paying monthly to spending almost nothing (just the cost of one EC2 or internal VM).

3. Monitoring Internal Services: Pingdom couldn’t monitor private/internal URLs — Uptime Kuma can (because we self-host it inside the network).

Before vs After

Security Notes

• Access is behind a VPN
• Config and data are stored on an attached volume
• We use security groups to limit access
• Slack and Teams alerts are webhook-based with proper tokens and webhooks

What the Team Said

“Honestly, I thought it would be buggy. But it’s fast, clean, and we control everything.”

— One of our DevOps Engineers

What’s Not Perfect?

Let’s be real — Uptime Kuma isn’t flawless.

• No mobile app (yet)
• Some alert configs need trial and error
• Not as polished in analytics/reporting as paid tools
• But we didn’t mind. For most use cases, it just worked.

Our Final Setup

We now monitor:

• All environments: dev, qa, integration, prod
• Private Tools and Applications like Jenkins, Nexus, ECS endpoints, APIs
• Public-facing applications
• We even have a shared status page for our internal teams so they can check if something’s down before raising a ticket.

Final Thoughts

Pingdom is great — no hate there. But for our use case, Uptime Kuma gave us 100% of the value at 0% of the cost. At To The New (TTN), we manage infrastructure for multiple environments across various clients. Cost optimization is a continuous effort, and monitoring was one of those areas we knew could be improved. Reach out to us for your monitoring workload. We can build as well as monitor your infrastructure.

If you’re part of a DevOps or SRE team looking to:

• Cut monitoring costs
• Gain flexibility
• Monitor internal and external services from one centralized place
• Give Uptime Kuma a try.

It might surprise you — just like it surprised us.