IsDown Pricing is Going Up February 16: Here Are Your Options

If you're currently using IsDown or evaluating it for your service monitoring needs, you've got about a week to make a decision. On February 16, 2026, IsDown is implementing price increases across all their plans — ranging from 9% to 20% depending on your tier.

The good news? Existing customers are grandfathered in at current rates. The less-good news? If you're shopping around or planning to upgrade, you'll be paying the new prices. And if you're monitoring more than a handful of services, those increases start to add up quickly.

Let's break down exactly what's changing, what you're getting for your money, and whether it's time to explore alternatives.

What's Changing: The New IsDown Pricing

Here's the before-and-after breakdown:

Plan	Current Price	New Price (Feb 16)	Increase	% Change
Pro	$45/month	$49/month	+$4	8.9%
Premium	$89/month	$99/month	+$10	11.2%
Business	$179/month	$199/month	+$20	11.2%
Enterprise	$6,000/year	$7,200/year	+$1,200	20%
MSP	$4,200/year	$4,800/year	+$600	14.3%

If you're on the Pro plan, an extra $4/month isn't going to break the bank. But if you're a managed service provider or enterprise customer, you're looking at an extra $600 to $1,200 per year — which starts to matter when you're managing budgets and evaluating ROI.

What You Get at Each Tier

IsDown has always positioned itself as a comprehensive status page aggregator with monitoring and alerting capabilities. Here's what each tier includes:

Pro Plan ($49/month)

• Monitor up to 30 services
• Unlimited alerts (email, SMS, Slack, webhooks)
• 30-day incident history
• Public and private dashboards
• Basic API access

This is the sweet spot for small teams or solo developers who need to stay on top of third-party service outages without building their own monitoring infrastructure.

Premium Plan ($99/month)

• Monitor up to 100 services
• Everything in Pro
• Advanced filtering and search
• Custom alert rules
• Priority support
• Incident analytics

If your product depends on a complex web of APIs and SaaS tools, this tier gives you better visibility and control.

Business Plan ($199/month)

• Monitor up to 300 services
• Everything in Premium
• New: MCP Server integration (Business+ plans only)
• Team collaboration features
• White-label options
• SSO integration

The new MCP Server feature is interesting — it allows you to integrate IsDown's monitoring data directly into AI workflows and automation tools. If you're building internal tools or want programmatic access to outage data, this could be valuable.

Enterprise & MSP Plans ($7,200-$7,800/year)

• Custom service limits
• Dedicated support
• Custom integrations
• SLA guarantees
• Multi-tenant management (MSP)

These are designed for large organizations or service providers managing monitoring for multiple clients.

When Does the Price Increase Actually Matter?

Let's be honest: if you're monitoring 5-10 critical services and IsDown is already part of your workflow, an extra $4-20/month probably isn't a dealbreaker. The platform is solid, the data is good, and switching tools has its own cost in time and setup.

But the increase starts to matter if:

You're monitoring 30+ services regularly. At that point, you're paying $600-2,400/year, and alternatives start looking more attractive — especially free or lower-cost options.

You're primarily a developer or small team. If you're comfortable with APIs and don't need a polished dashboard for non-technical stakeholders, you might not need all of IsDown's features. A developer-focused tool could give you 80% of the value at 0% of the cost.

You're price-sensitive or early-stage. Every recurring expense matters when you're bootstrapping or watching your burn rate. If monitoring costs aren't justified by business value, it's worth re-evaluating.

You're already frustrated with limitations. If you've been bumping up against service limits or missing features, a price increase is a natural time to shop around rather than paying more for the same pain points.

The Alternatives: What Else Is Out There?

The good news is that service status monitoring isn't a monopoly market. There are several solid alternatives, each with different strengths depending on your use case.

API Status Check (Free, Developer-Focused)

Price: Free
Best for: Developers, startups, anyone monitoring common APIs

This is us, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt — but API Status Check was built specifically for the use case of "I just need to know if Stripe/AWS/GitHub/etc. is down right now."

We monitor 117+ popular APIs and SaaS platforms and surface real-time status directly through:

• A simple web dashboard at apistatuscheck.com
• MCP server integration via npm (apistatuscheck-mcp-server) — yes, we have this too, and it's free
• Clean API endpoints you can hit programmatically

What we don't have: custom service monitoring, SMS alerts, team collaboration features, or white-label dashboards. We're not trying to be an all-in-one enterprise platform. We're trying to be the fastest way to check if your dependencies are on fire.

If you're mainly tracking well-known services (Stripe, OpenAI, Vercel, Cloudflare, etc.), this is a zero-cost alternative that covers 90% of developer needs.

StatusGator ($8/month and up)

Price: Starts at $8/month for 10 services
Best for: Teams needing consolidated status across SaaS tools

StatusGator is IsDown's closest competitor. They aggregate status pages from thousands of services and let you create custom dashboards, get alerts, and track historical uptime.

Pricing scales based on the number of services you monitor:

• Starter: $8/month (10 services)
• Team: $39/month (50 services)
• Business: $99/month (100 services)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

The value proposition is similar to IsDown, but with different pricing tiers and a slightly more enterprise-focused feel. If you're comparing the two, it's worth running the numbers for your specific service count.

Downdetector (Free, Consumer-Focused)

Price: Free
Best for: Quick checks, consumer services

Downdetector is the crowd-sourced option. When a major service goes down and Twitter lights up, Downdetector aggregates those reports and shows real-time outage maps.

It's great for:

• Quickly checking if other people are experiencing issues
• Major consumer services (Netflix, Xbox Live, banking apps)
• Getting a sense of outage severity and geography

It's not great for:

• Proactive monitoring (it's reactive by nature)
• B2B or niche APIs that don't have broad consumer usage
• Programmatic access or integrations

Think of it as a supplement, not a replacement, for proper monitoring.

Better Stack (Starts at $24/month)

Price: $24/month and up
Best for: Teams wanting full observability, not just status monitoring

Better Stack (formerly known for Better Uptime) offers a more comprehensive monitoring platform that includes:

• Uptime monitoring for your own services
• Incident management and on-call scheduling
• Status pages you can host for your customers
• Integrated log management and APM

This is a different category of tool — you're not just monitoring other people's services; you're monitoring your own infrastructure and building status pages for your users.

If you need both "is AWS down?" and "is our API down?" monitoring in one place, Better Stack is worth a look. But it's also more expensive and complex than a pure status aggregator.

UptimeRobot (Free tier available)

Price: Free for 50 monitors, $7/month for more features
Best for: Monitoring your own infrastructure

UptimeRobot is all about monitoring your own URLs, servers, and endpoints — not third-party status pages. You set up HTTP/HTTPS monitors, port checks, and keyword checks, and get alerted when something goes down.

This is complementary to IsDown/API Status Check:

• Use UptimeRobot to monitor your own app/API
• Use IsDown or API Status Check to monitor your dependencies

The free tier is generous (50 monitors, 5-minute check intervals), making it a solid choice for small teams or side projects.

Decision Framework: Should You Stay or Switch?

Here's a practical way to think about it:

Stay with IsDown if:

• You're monitoring 50+ services and need the centralized dashboard
• You value the advanced filtering, alerting, and analytics features
• Your team or clients are non-technical and need a polished UI
• You're grandfathered in at the old pricing
• The new MCP Server feature matters for your workflow

Switch to API Status Check if:

• You're mainly monitoring popular APIs (Stripe, AWS, GitHub, OpenAI, etc.)
• You're comfortable with developer-focused tools
• You want to eliminate a recurring cost without losing core functionality
• You need MCP integration but don't want to pay $199/month for it

Switch to StatusGator if:

• IsDown's pricing doesn't make sense for your service count
• You want similar features with different tier breakpoints
• You're comparing options and want to shop on price

Switch to Better Stack if:

• You need to monitor your own infrastructure and third-party dependencies
• You want incident management and on-call features
• You're building a status page for your own customers

Combine tools if:

• Use API Status Check (free) for common APIs
• Use UptimeRobot (free) for your own servers
• Use IsDown or StatusGator (paid) only for custom/niche services you can't find elsewhere

This hybrid approach gives you 80-90% of the value at a fraction of the cost.

What About the New MCP Server Feature?

One interesting addition in IsDown's announcement is the MCP Server integration available on Business+ plans ($199/month and up).

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a new standard for connecting AI systems to data sources. In practice, this means you could:

• Query IsDown's status data directly from Claude or other AI assistants
• Build automations that react to service outages
• Integrate outage data into internal dashboards or chatbots

This is legitimately useful if you're building AI-powered tools or want to embed monitoring into your existing workflows.

However, it's worth noting that API Status Check also offers an MCP server — and it's free via npm:

npm install -g apistatuscheck-mcp-server

So if MCP integration is the draw, you can get it from us without paying $199/month. The tradeoff is that you're limited to the 117+ services we monitor versus IsDown's broader catalog.

The Bottom Line

IsDown's price increase isn't outrageous — they're building a solid product and 10-20% increases are normal in SaaS. But when you're paying $600-7,200/year for monitoring, it's worth pausing to ask: Am I getting $600-7,200 of value?

For some teams, absolutely. If you're monitoring dozens of niche services, need advanced alerting, or have non-technical stakeholders who rely on the dashboard, IsDown is still competitive.

But if you're a developer or small team monitoring common APIs, you might be paying for features you don't use. That's where alternatives like API Status Check shine — you get the core functionality (real-time status, programmatic access, MCP integration) at zero cost.

The smartest move? Take the next nine days to:

1. List out which services you actually monitor regularly
2. Check if they're covered by API Status Check (117+ and growing)
3. Test alternatives to see if they meet your needs
4. Decide whether you're getting value from IsDown's premium features

If you end up sticking with IsDown, great — you'll know it's a conscious choice, not inertia. And if you switch, you'll save hundreds or thousands per year without losing visibility into your critical dependencies.

Try API Status Check Free

We built API Status Check because we needed it ourselves. No signup, no credit card, no pricing tiers to navigate. Just real-time status for 117+ APIs, available at apistatuscheck.com.

Check it out, and if you're currently using IsDown, let us know what we're missing. We're actively adding new services and features based on what developers actually need.

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Have questions about migrating from IsDown or want to request a specific API for monitoring? Reach out at shibley@apistatuscheck.com.