Better Stack Pricing Overview

I mostly use Uptime service(formerly Better Uptime) for monitoring, while also using Logs occasionally to grab logs from Cloudflare and couple of linux VMs. I will mostly talk about Uptime because that's what I mostly use. But Better Stack Logs also has powerful features, I don't use most of them but you should check it out. It is really easy to get started with uptime monitoring. Monitoring a server? A simple ping check will do. If not, you can monitor any URL, any port of any IP, check IMAP/SMTP, or even check HTTP responses for keywords for checking. Do you want to monitor something that has no exposed service to the Internet, like your home router behind CGNAT? No problem. just put a "curl https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v1/heartbeat/xxxxxx" on crontab, or find a way to ping the URL at any interval you choose, and you're done. If no heartbeat is received within selected interval, after a confirmation period, alarm goes off. If you want to go even further, their simple yet powerful API and integrations look like they can take you even further, but for smaller operations it is not needed. I, for example, used Zapier integration to post an alert to my Discord server when stuff goes down. There are integrations with popular services such as heroku, Google Cloud, or Webhook in/out (so you can create incidents via webhooks if you don't want to go with API yet get similar function) that you can use to both "import data" and "export data", Importing being monitoring or creating alerts/incidents from other services, and exporting being alerting via other services, like Trello or Slack(similar to my discord example). When an alarm goes off, yes you get an email, yes you can see it on the page, standard stuff. If that's not enough, you can get notifications in literally anywhere else you choose thanks to integrations I mentioned. No Internet at all? Well, if you don't have internet you can't really do anything about the issue that may arise, but at least you'll know something is wrong because you can choose to get called on your phone by Better Stack. It will not be a real person, obviously it's a robocall, but you'll still get notified and you can even acknowledge the incident on the phone call if you're on it so it doesn't call others. The design of the status page is slick and easy to understand, you can edit the basic layout of the services you want to show on the page(you don't have to show all of them) and you can manually create and edit incidents, maintenance notices and more. You have quite a few customization options if you want to dig in, but honestly you'll feel just fine with the default settings. Customer support is just amazing. They will answer your questions directly, without sending you random help articles like any other service does. I am using this service for more than a year, and I did not have any major issues, and couple of minor issues were quickly addressed thanks to the customer service being super fast and straight to point. They know their customers are usually IT people, so they don't spend time explaining stuff that everyone already knows. Only major-ish issue I had was their status page itself going down every now and then before(I added the status page itself to their status monitor just for the sake of it, how ironic lol), but they were already aware of the problems even before I asked what's going on. As I said, I am using this service for over a year at this point, and I do not plan on giving up at all. If they keep operating for 10 years, I will keep using this service for 10 years, for my personal projects as well as any professional work I might do, and I will happily pay for it because it is 1000% worth the money imo.

Status pages can definitely get some more user-friendly customization options. You can choose between multiple layouts and even put your own CSS/JS code, which should allow you to do literally everything, but I don't think that's the most user friendly way to do it. Design of the status page itself is pretty decent and you will not have an issue to use it as is, but being able to more easily customize it would be nice to have. Also I saw on the pricing page that some features I am currently enjoying as a free user is no longer being offered to new free users, and even some of them, such as ability to use your own domain, are only offered on Enterprise plan, which greatly reduces the usability of the service on lower/free tiers. While it is nice that they don't take features away from existing users(that's the easiest way to get your users angry, for example, look at twitter), but I would expect a bit more transparency while this change took place, I only realized this is the case after I recommended the product to another geek friend of mine only for him to realise that he cannot have some features I have without paying quite a considerable amount of money. And on the Logs, they primarily use Vector to collect logs from all kinds of services across platforms. While vector itself is not a bad system, sometimes it randomly stops working and errors out, resulting in logs from servers not appearing on the service. That's probably something customer service can asisst me for a solution, but I had other issues with the vector itself in other use cases I don't really want to deal with it and I'd prefer alternative methods being offered for Debian systems.

I didn't even know I needed to monitor for uptime, because you know, couple of VMs, and one page via Cloudflare Pages. They won't go down, right? Well, it turns out they do. And when they go down, they took your mail server down with it, or your VPN, or your Wordpress instance, or your Minecraft server, then your girlfriend calls you and complains, etc etc. It is a one-man show around here, so I don't really have *that* much going on, but knowing a problem exists is pretty helpful so you can solve it. For example, I recently found out that the server I rented recently from a local company is having random internet dropouts. I got in contact with the hosting company and they tracked it down to a larger intermittent issue with the actual datacenter, so I'm currently planning on moving my services from Bursa back to Istanbul. Although as I said, I don't really have much going on, I try to provide useful stuff to my friends around me, like an adblocking DNS or a small VPN via wireguard, and I'd like to sleep knowing they are still working and I won't learn that my minecraft server crashed out and is down for multiple days from my friends, for example.

Very well designed and straightforward interface with plenty of options to monitor almost anything you need monitored. The integrations with other services really makes this a service that can be your central focal point for a monitoring system of all things. This all along with a very attractive price makes it difficult to consider any other option.

It would be nice to be able to "pause" team members, so they don't get alerts while on vacation or out of the office. Or even to have active hours for a certain person. This goes for monitor checks, would be nice to place a specific monitor into Maintenance mode on demand for xx minutes. Also would be nice to have more complex scheduling for maintenance periods (i.e. every 3rd friday of a month, etc).

Monitoring when websites go down so we can respond to outages quickly.

I would definitely say that the calling feature is the best part of BetterStack - my developers can be alerted almost instantly after an incident is started. I also love the simplicity and how easy it is to deploy the status page. I think that status pages now look really bad, Atlassian status pages just don't look that good; they're bland, no dark mode, and look like an old webpage. However, BetterStacks' Status Page looks absolutely amazing. I had an amazing support conversation with a BetterStack employee, I asked if I could recieve one more team member on my dashboard, which normally comes at a cost - they said yes! I was very surprised that they said yes, and very happy too. The support response time was a few hours, and I was kept updated.

I only have one thing, which is the lack of a Discord integration. I would like for me to be able to create incidents through a Discord bot. It would also be really really cool if there was a Discord bot in a channel that would edit its message based on the status. For example, there's a message that says "All Systems Operational," however, when there is an incident, the embed color changes to yellow and provides a timeline of all status updates, and the effected monitors.

BetterStack is making the process of calling IT members automatic. It will call IT right when an issue starts, including me! This makes downtime very minimal. Not only that, but I can track the ping of my website in multiple regions - allowing me to determine where I need to deploy edge servers at.

It has a free plan to use and it's enough for small business. I can monitor 10 websites with 3 region and also I can create a status page with using my subdomain.

The Freelancer plan's price is too high.

Better Uptime monitors my websites for me and informs me when something happened to them.

I've been using Better Uptime for a while now and have been very impressed. It was very easy to set up and is very easy to use. I tried other similar offerings but settled with Better Uptime for its stability and ease of use.

Nothing really to dislike. I'm only on the free tier, but this covers everything I need. At first, I thought the pricing was a little high, but having used it I can see it would be value for money.

Compared to my previous onsite monitoring system Better Uptime (being off-site) is far more stable and reliable. I've never missed an alert and have very few false positives.

It provides an easy to use interface with SQL-like queries. It's integration allowed me to add Logtail to my projects in a few minutes, unlike other products out there.

I don't think there are any downsides to using Logtail, at least I haven't found any. It serves it's role as it should and there aren't any major issues. Improvements? The only thing I can come up with is a better filtering system, but the one in place is already really good

Logtail has helped me efficiently log all requests to my applications for a good price. Thanks to Logtail I can focus on creating and developing products I offer and I don't have to think about some requests failing.

I have tried many status page before, especially the one from Jira and UptimeRobot, unfortunalely the features were not great and the UX horrible. I use betteruptime for my growing business, the ping and hearbeat features really change my dev life, the fact that I can connect everything with Slack or get a call if my services go down is awesome. The nice thing is that for once, even with the free plan you get a nice service to get started.

Price is a bit high for a solo developer, might upgrade when my buisness grown though.

Peace of mind when not manually monitoring services as well as quicker response when an incident occur.

Both Heartbeet and Monitoring are working great. It also has great support that will respond to your requests in only a few hours.

The only downside is that you can only use 10 monitors if you are using the free tier. But I believe that that is more than enough for most people.

The best feature is that you will receive a mail if one of your services is no longer available.