StatusCake alternative for free uptime monitoring
The Logdash free plan gives every service one HTTP monitor checked every five minutes, Telegram and webhook alerts and a public status page, and it says plainly which parts are paid.
Every free uptime plan has a shape. Somewhere in it there is a check interval, a monitor count, an alert channel that turns out to be paid, or a retention window that quietly makes the history useless. The question is never whether a free plan has limits. It is whether they are the limits you will hit.
StatusCake has been doing this for a long time and its free plan is a real product, not a trial. It also has a wider catalogue than Logdash: SSL and domain expiry, page speed, keyword checks. Logdash has none of those. If the thing that worries you is a certificate expiring on a Saturday, StatusCake solves it today and Logdash does not.
Here is the Logdash free plan without the marketing. Each service gets one HTTP monitor, checked every five minutes, recording status code and response time. Alerts go to Telegram or a webhook, both free, with no per-channel upsell. Your dashboard can be made public as a status page on a logdash.io URL, and a custom domain is on Pro. Logs and metrics arrive from the same SDK into the same project, with a day of log retention on free. Push monitors for cron jobs and faster check intervals are paid, and there is no free path to them.
The endpoint the monitor will hit
# FastAPI. Return 503 when a dependency is down so the monitor sees it.
@app.get("/health")
async def health():
try:
await db.execute("select 1")
except Exception:
return JSONResponse({"status": "degraded"}, status_code=503)
return {"status": "ok"}- 1 Add the service Create a service in Logdash and give its monitor your health URL. The free plan checks it every five minutes.
- 2 Publish the status page Make the dashboard public and you have a status page on a logdash.io URL. Custom domains are on the Pro plan.
- 3 Attach Telegram Connect a Telegram channel to the monitor. The next check that does not come back 200 sends the alert to Telegram.
Logdash vs StatusCake
| Feature | Logdash | StatusCake |
|---|---|---|
| Free HTTP monitoring | One monitor per service, five minute checks | A real free uptime plan, limits set by StatusCake |
| Check types beyond HTTP | None. Status code and response time only. | SSL, domain expiry, page speed, keyword |
| Alert channels | Telegram and webhook, on every plan | Email plus a long integration list |
| Jobs that have no URL | Push monitors: the job POSTs to Logdash when it finishes | Checks reach out to a URL you own |
| Logs and metrics in the same project | Eight SDKs, one timeline with the uptime history | A monitoring product, not a log store |
| Public status page | Free, custom domain on Pro | Public reporting pages |
| Open source | MIT, full source on GitHub | Commercial SaaS |
When StatusCake is the better pick
- You need SSL or domain expiry warnings. Logdash has neither, and an expired certificate is a real outage with a boring cause.
- You want page speed or keyword checks. Logdash records the status code and the response time and knows nothing about the page itself.
- Your alerts have to reach people who are not on Telegram and will not accept a webhook. That is most companies past about ten people.
- You want a vendor with a decade of operating history behind the uptime numbers. StatusCake has that and Logdash does not.
What the free plan runs out of
The five minute interval is the first wall. An outage can be nearly five minutes old before anyone hears about it, which is fine for a side project and not fine once someone is paying you. The second wall is heartbeats, because push monitors are paid, so free covers your API but not your cron. The third is retention: one day of logs, which is enough to debug this morning and not enough to work out what changed last Tuesday. None of that sits behind a sales call, and you can read all of it before you sign up. Free plans that hide the interval until you have wired up alerts are the ones to be careful with.
Is there an open source StatusCake alternative?
Logdash is MIT licensed with the source on GitHub. If what you want is to run the server yourself, Uptime Kuma is the more honest answer today, because Logdash self-hosting is not production ready.
Is Logdash actually free?
There is a free plan: one HTTP monitor per service, five minute checks, Telegram and webhook alerts, a public status page and a day of log retention. Faster checks, longer retention and push monitors are paid.
Are alerts included on the free plan?
Yes. Telegram and webhooks are both free, and they are also the only two channels on any plan.
Can I self-host Logdash?
Not for production yet. The repo runs locally for development and a proper install is open work tracked on GitHub.