I've never cared that I have to pay for service uptime monitors — in fact, I want to pay for services like this. I'm not sure why being free is such a big selling point, for me at least.
A lot of times you have to monitor your personal blogs, websites, etc. You don’t make any money from those.
While I agree with paying for software, I can understand the idea behind not wanting to pay for uptime monitors. The advantage is that the service (at least on the free tier with no priority support or anything) is so cheap to offer that companies can offer a generous free tier that they can still turn into profit thanks to a few enterprise clients.
I agree with the personal blogs, etc. And I thought the same thing, too, about them turning profit on larger customers, but then I was confused when their enterprise tier was only $42/mo. Not a dig at the product, just more curious as to who their target market is.
When I see "forever free", I usually avoid it, especially for business use, for fear or it not existing in a year or 2. If "free" if your main selling point, to me, that screams low quality.
Is it a lead gen for the main product? Seems disconnected if so, but they likely know their market better, so maybe it isn't.
Many of its competitors removed the free plan because they offer something different, which is worth paying for. For example websitepulse code the custom web transaction scripts for free
Considering you can quickly knock up an Azure Function to do the same thing and a lot more for free, yes. For example pingdom will only wait 30s and time out. You can’t condigure that to be higher on any plan.