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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.

7 of 29 comments (clear)

  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.

  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.

  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 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.

    3. 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.

  4. 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.