We have been long-time satisfied and loyal users of UptimeRobot because it worked reliably and fell into the "good enough" category we often mentioned. Even if there were some shortcomings, we quickly got over them.
However, we were recently informed that the free version is no longer available for business use, which, as I wrote earlier, was not comprehensive. There is a post about the non-free and free packages, but for now, I want to highlight a comparison with what happened to cable TV:
Netflix's offer was that you could cancel your cable TV subscription because you get everything here and it’s cheaper. (Thanks to the fact that over the years and decades, cable TVs also broke down their offerings into smaller, extra packages with continuous price increases to get more from the customer). Thus, Netflix and all other media providers took this route, as even the paid Netflix package now includes advertisements and a single subscription no longer covers all needs, so you need to contract with multiple providers, making it much more expensive and complicated compared to the original, discounted, ad-free offer - similar to cable TVs. Yes, SaaS, or cloud service providers, are also following this model. This brings us to the point where, when we consider which software we need to operate a business, we quickly realize that no matter how profitable our business is, if we paid the full price for each one, there would be no profit margin left to maintain our business.
Given this, we need to weigh which solutions to use, which ones we are willing to pay for, and which solutions to use for free and open-source options, where the "cost of ownership" and the time invested also come into play.
Some software tries to cleverly ride these pricing strategies and trends, and for example, considering the Odoo offer, it's not bad to get "everything." But firstly, this "everything" is not truly everything, because even if Odoo covers many areas, there will still be many other things needed alongside it. Moreover, the per-user, per-month cost may still not be cost-effective for most companies.
Taking the above considerations into account, we put together our systems and make recommendations to our clients. Reverting to the monitoring and status page, we had the option to choose from other free or open-source solutions (like Uptime Kuma), or AWS-based lambda solutions or Function App in the Azure cloud, etc., besides paid packages.
But as long as there is a free or economical service on the market that meets the need, even if we have to switch between them from time to time, which still takes a fraction of the time compared to running our own open-source, the remaining financial budget can be used for truly important or unavailable solutions, while the freed-up time can be spent on more useful things. Thus, we have now chosen HetrixTools, though we also thoroughly examined Pulsetic. The new page can be accessed at https://status.backendo.com
