saysOK vs UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is the well-known low-cost uptime checker, with a large free plan. saysOK costs more at the low end and puts seats for a team, on-call and incident handling into each paid plan.
- Incident
- INC-2841
- Affected
- Acme shop
- 02:14:07 Slack · #client-alerts sent
- 02:14:08 Phone call · Maya, on call this week answered
- 02:15:31 Acknowledged by Maya
Side by side
saysOK's column is what its plans include today. UptimeRobot's is what its pricing page said on Oct 8, 2026; check there for current figures. Its page showed euros; dollar figures are approximate, at the European Central Bank's reference rate of 1.1186 dollars to the euro on Oct 8, 2026.
| What is compared | saysOK | UptimeRobot |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ||
| Paid plans | $19 or $79 a monthPro or Team, flat per workspace | About $11, $46 or $86 a monthSolo, Team or Scale: €10, €41 or €77 as its page showed them; less when billed yearly |
| People included | 5 or 10 seatsPro or Team; $4 a month per extra seat on Team | 3 or 5 seatsTeam or Scale; further seats are sold one by one |
| Free plan | 10 monitors5 min interval, 1 status page | 50 monitors5 min interval, 1 status page; described as for hobby and non-profit projects |
| Monitoring | ||
| Monitors | 50 or 250Pro or Team | 10, 100 or 200Solo, Team or Scale |
| Fastest check | 30 sec or 15 secPro or Team, up to 3 million or 15 million checks a month | 60, 30 or 15 secSolo, Team or Scale |
| History | 90 daysPro and Team | 12 or 24 monthsSolo; Team and Scale |
| Status pages | ||
| Status pages | 3 or unlimitedPro or Team, each on your own domain | 3, 100 or unlimitedSolo, Team or Scale, on your own domain |
| Alerts | ||
| SMS and voice call alerts | 50 messages and 20 calls a monthSMS or WhatsApp, on Pro. Team: 500 and 100 | CreditsSolo 10 to 20, Team 30, Scale 50 to 200; more sold in packs |
Which plan you would need
Set how many monitors you run and how often each must be checked. UptimeRobot's page showed euros; its prices are shown here in dollars at the rate below, so they are approximate. UptimeRobot's figures are its listed monthly prices from Oct 8, 2026, at 1.1186 dollars to the euro (European Central Bank, Oct 8, 2026); tax is left out of both.
UptimeRobot Team, about $46 a month; saysOK Pro, $19 a month.
What happens at 02:14 with saysOK.
One night at a made-up product, step by step: what saysOK does on its own, what your team sees, and what your customers read.
- Your teamThe check from Frankfurt gets HTTP 503From api.acme.example/health. One region only, so nobody is paged yet.02:14:00
- Your teamVirginia sees it too: incident openedSEV-1. Maya, primary on call, gets a push notification and the Slack message at once.02:14:07Your status page“We are investigating an issue affecting API.”Nobody typed it: the page and its subscribers are updated from the incident.
- Your teamMaya acknowledgesFrom the Slack message. The secondary on call is never woken.02:16:30
- Your teamChecks pass from every region: resolvedThe incident resolves itself, and the Slack message says so.02:29:50Your status page“This incident has been resolved.”API is operational again, and subscribers are told.
- Your teamThe post-mortem is writtenStarted from the incident's timeline.09:30:00Your status pageThe post-mortem goes on the pageUnder the incident, for customers to read.
- Down for
- 15 min 50 s
- Customers told
- at 02:14
- Status updates typed
- none
Which one fits
Neither is right for everyone. This is how we would choose.
Choose UptimeRobot if
- You want the most monitors for free: 50 against saysOK's 10.
- You work alone and need a handful of monitors at the lowest price.
- You need more than 90 days of history: it keeps 12 or 24 months.
Choose saysOK if
- A small team shares the work: Pro includes 5 seats and Team 10.
- You want on-call schedules, escalations and post-mortems in the same tool as the checks.
- You would rather have SMS and calls as a monthly allowance than as credits to top up.
What saysOK includes
Part of the product, not sold as an add-on.
On-call, with a next person if nobody answers
A schedule says who is primary and who is secondary each day. An alert rule pages them in steps: when an alert is not acknowledged in time, the next person is paged.
- at once Slack · #alerts
- +5 min Primary on-call, if not acknowledged
- +10 min Secondary on-call, if still not acknowledged
Every incident keeps its record
A timeline of what was detected, who acknowledged and when it was resolved, with a severity from SEV-1 to SEV-4. Write the post-mortem from it and publish it to your status page.
- 02:14:07Detected: Acme shop is down
- 02:14:08Maya paged by phone call
- 02:15:31Acknowledged by Maya
- 02:31:10Resolved: checks passing again
Cron jobs and backups, next to the uptime checks
A heartbeat monitor expects a ping from each scheduled job and alerts when one does not arrive, so a backup that silently stopped is found the same day.
# crontab: report in when the backup has run
0 3 * * * backup.sh && curl -fsS https://saysok.com/api/heartbeats/YOUR_TOKEN/pingAn API, and a way in for AI assistants
Monitors, incidents and heartbeats are reachable over a public REST API. The MCP endpoint lets assistants such as Claude Code and Cursor work with them too.
curl https://api.saysok.com/v1/monitors \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
claude mcp add --transport http saysok https://api.saysok.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
Try it on your own sites.
The free plan covers 10 monitors and one status page. Move to Pro or Team when you need faster checks or seats for a team.