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Pingdom Will Kill Its Free Website Monitoring Plan on February 6 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the end-of-an-era dept.

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring and performance management service, will soon stop welcoming non-paying users. In an email sent to users today, Pingdom announced that it will be ending its free tier on February 6. From a report: The move, which has unsurprisingly upset many users, comes five years after Pingdom was acquired by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based firm. In its email, Pingdom said it intends to focus its resources and investment on the next phase of its product development. Founded in 2007, Pingdom attracted over 500,000 users from 200 countries in seven years, before it was acquired. Several major companies, including Google, Spotify, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Evernote, Mailchimp, Github, Square, Instagram, and others became its clients.

29 comments

  1. No surprise by Kernel+Kurtz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    SolarWinds really crippled their free version of Kiwi Syslog Server recently too. Would not be at all surprised if it goes away as well.

    1. Re:No surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SolarWinds & Windows based monitoring software can't just scale in big deployments - stay away :)

    2. Re:No surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what you are saying is..it's not web scale. I think I know a product that can help.

    3. Re: No surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      $olarWind$ is all about the $$$

  2. Left them long ago by dclxv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We left Pingdom long ago in favor of Uptime Robot (https://uptimerobot.com/). Their free service is great and their paid service is perfect for our limited needs as a web hosting provider.

    1. Re:Left them long ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, there are other great options out there. Try using Freshping (https://www.freshworks.com/website-monitoring/). The best part about it is you can monitor up to 50 URLs with in 1 min intervals.

  3. Disappointed by Herkum01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't understand the obsession with not offering a limited free product. I liked Pingdom, it has numerous quirks that I would not have over looked if they were asking for me to pay to use.

    1. Re:Disappointed by shortscruffydave · · Score: 2

      I don't understand the obsession with not offering a limited free product. I liked Pingdom, it has numerous quirks that I would not have over looked if they were asking for me to pay to use.

      I think it often comes down to shareholder pressure. If your primary view of a business its the bottom line, then the people using the limited free product are just freeloaders....drive them out, remove the overhead of subsidising them, boost bottom line value.

    2. Re:Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pingdom is a privately held company.

    3. Re: Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You could offer a free service too, what is stopping you from doing that? Perhaps the void left by Pingdom exiting an unpaid service market will be enough for you to make a profitable business.

    4. Re:Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If your primary view of a business its the bottom line, then the people using the limited free product are just freeloaders

      The problem with that bit of stupidity (theirs, not yours) is that without those people who made the service popular, the service wouldn't exist.

      These startups wouldn't exist to get bought by assholes with more money without the people who gave value to them in the first place.

      Solar Winds only has a product to sell because of the people who used it, now hopefully they lose any goodwill, and their product completely devalues. And then they can stand there wondering why they have no customers.

    5. Re:Disappointed by WankerWeasel · · Score: 2

      And did the free version get you to upgrade and go with the paid version? If not, you're just costing them resources and money and it should be easy to see why they may want to get rid of freeloaders impacting their bottomline. Free versions can be a way to get people in the door but unless you can convert a good portion of them, they don't really do much but leech resources from you.

    6. Re:Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Big surprise there, for most basement dwellers. And you had to explain how the world outside works -- whoop-de-frickin-doo.

      Film at 11.

    7. Re:Disappointed by Herkum01 · · Score: 2

      I used a free version to get comfortable with the product and figure it out. Once I understood what I could and could not do, I wanted to commit to using the product in production. I ended up upgrading to an Enterprise license after about 1 year.

      If you are not offering a free product, you are just asking me to do pay for everything to test a product. My time is not free either, and you asking for me and my company to commit to an unknown product. You can offer it for free while we try to see if we can get it work.

    8. Re:Disappointed by WankerWeasel · · Score: 1

      I'm not saying companies shouldn't provide a free product to let people kick the tires. The loss comes when they continue providing those services to users for long periods. Someone that just uses your free version year after year and never upgrades to the paid service isn't doing much to help your business unless they're recommending it to others who are buying. This is why companies look at the churn and upgrade rates. It's likely Pingdom found that not enough free users were upgrading to justify continuing to give away the service for free and the resources/cost it incurred from doing such.

    9. Re:Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think one thing companies miss in their metrics is mindshare. Sure I might have a personal site that I spend $0 on forever, but I've introduced Pingdom to every single employer I've worked for.

    10. Re:Disappointed by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      If you are not offering a free product, you are just asking me to do pay for everything to test a product. My time is not free either, and you asking for me and my company to commit to an unknown product. You can offer it for free while we try to see if we can get it work.

      The problem with free trials is they're never long enough - a week, a month? Especially something like this where it may not go down for a while.

      Maybe the thing is to offer a free month of monitoring at which point unlimited messages or notifications can be sent, then after that month (this is to get it integrated in your systems), you get N notifications for free, however long it takes with emails reminding you you're still on the plan and how many free notifications you have left before you should subscribe. After all, if you have it monitoring a website, and your website is reliable, you may never actually get a chance to test it in reality in a month.

    11. Re:Disappointed by Sniper98G · · Score: 1

      Private companies still have shareholders. It's just an invite only affair.

    12. Re:Disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      After all, if you have it monitoring a website, and your website is reliable, you may never actually get a chance to test it in reality in a month.

      That's why datacenters have big red 'testing' buttons by the door.

    13. Re:Disappointed by barc0001 · · Score: 1

      Um, no.

      > The move, which has unsurprisingly upset many users, comes five years after Pingdom was acquired by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based firm

      > https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/swi

      SolarWinds is public.

    14. Re:Disappointed by barc0001 · · Score: 1

      The problem with that line of thought for a company like Pingdom is that free service is how you get a significant percentage of your new paying business as well. Many people aren't going to sign up for even $5 a month to monitor a simple site or two, but they'd sign up to a free one. And once they got used to how that monitoring service worked, if their needs changed or their place of employ needed to monitor more robustly, they are far more likely to just go with the paid version of what they are already using for free instead of shopping around.

      This is exactly why Adobe has piles of money today. They know damn well that graphics arts students pirate the living shit out of all their stuff and they wink-wink-nudge-nudge say "That's wrooooong, please don't do that" - wink. Knowing full well that when those students get big boy and big girl jobs, their place of employ will shell out thousands to buy those same Adobe products that they spent the last several years using constantly.

  4. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A few less false reports of down servers from our stupid customers won't bother me one bit.

    "My server is down!"

    "Can you get to your sites?"

    "Yes, but look at this pingdom report."

  5. Statuscake is still free by stazeii · · Score: 2

    Not sure why free accounts that monitor a single host was a huge drag on pingdom, but whatever. Closed my account and now just use statuscake.

  6. Alternatives? by slashkitty · · Score: 1

    I see statuscake and uptrends. Are these or others good alternatives to the pingdom free plan?

    --
    -- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
    1. Re:Alternatives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see statuscake and uptrends. Are these or others good alternatives to the pingdom free plan?

      visualping.com

  7. Nothing will be free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Every new month that comes along a new company stops giving their "free" service.
    Guess it's a trend.

  8. Free Service is an oxymoron by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. "Free" software is either a marketing ploy or is from a (group of) volunteer(s) who may or may not pay serious attention to updates and improvements, nearly always such efforts dissipate after a couple of years. Most likely is the product is not generating enough profit and the decision was made to determine if the free-loaders would pay. Chances are good that this still won't prevent discontinuation of the entire product family. That is, it is a "hail mary". When a company pulls in its marketing efforts, it bodes ill for the enterprise.

  9. It didn't tie into orion by grilled-cheese · · Score: 1

    Each time SolarWinds acquires a company, there is some time they're allowed to exist before ultimately they have to integrate with Orion so they can connect their cashbox to it more closely. Virtualization Manager for instance was a really nice product when it was introduced.