Desktop Website Monitor:
Stop Renting Uptime Monitoring

Three monitoring services, same pain

If you run a small web agency, you probably have accounts on two or three uptime monitoring services:

UptimeRobot Solo is €10/month. A single Better Stack responder seat is $34/month, and that is what unlocks uptime there. Those are the month-to-month prices; both companies discount a yearly commitment, so the yearly figures below are the cheapest way to buy either. Pingdom sells synthetic monitoring in quantity bundles behind a calculator, so it has no list price to quote. Maybe a dedicated SSL monitor and a separate content-change watcher on top.

Both of the first two have free tiers worth knowing about: UptimeRobot gives you 50 monitors on a 5-minute interval, Better Stack includes 10 monitors and a status page. The bill arrives when you want a shorter interval, more monitors, or status pages you control.

UptimeRobot's cheapest paid tier is €108 a year, and one Better Stack responder seat is $348 a year — both billed annually, which is the cheapest way to buy either — in a range that depends entirely on which service and how many monitors you need. For what? A green dot in a dashboard and an email when your site is down. You're paying for the cloud hosting, the billing system, the user management — features you don't need when you're the only person monitoring your sites.

What DeskUptime does

DeskUptime is a desktop website monitor that checks three things:

1. Uptime — HTTP status code + response time + redirect tracking
2. SSL — certificate expiry countdown, issuer, cipher, protocol
3. Content changes — SHA-256 hash comparison between checks

It's universal. Works on WordPress, Shopify, Netlify, hand-coded HTML. It doesn't care what CMS you use, because it checks from the outside — exactly like a real visitor would.

Free CLI

The terminal version is free and requires no account:

$ npx github:mahope/deskuptime check https://example.com

✅ https://example.com
   Status:   200 OK
   Response: 85ms
   🔒 SSL:     63 days ✅
   — Content: 559 bytes

Watch mode runs in the background, stores state in ~/.deskuptime/state.json, and prints alerts on status changes — site goes down, SSL expires within 14 days, or content changes from the last check.

$ deskuptime watch https://mystore.com --interval 300

👀 Monitoring 1 URL(s), every 300s.

[10:15 AM] ✓ all monitored sites OK
[10:20 AM] 🚨 https://mystore.com is DOWN
[10:25 AM] ✅ https://mystore.com is UP (200)

The free tier monitors up to 3 URLs and uses a minimum 60-second interval. State persists across restarts — stop and resume anything.

Free without a licence key: one-off checks, SSL and content checks, and JSON output for scripts and CI. The 3-URL limit applies to watch only.

What Pro ($19) adds

Pro unlocks with a license key — pay once, get a key, activate on up to 3 machines. No DRM, no subscription. Buy DeskUptime Pro for $19 once.

Why buy vs rent

The case is simple math:

DeskUptime is $19 once, against €108 or $348 a year for the cheapest paid tiers above. That is the first month’s rent either way, and then it keeps being savings.

Every figure in this table was read off the vendors’ own pricing pages — UptimeRobot 1 October 2026, Better Stack 30 September 2026. They change their prices, so UptimeRobot and Better Stack are linked — go and check them before you take the numbers as gospel.

Licensing & privacy

Payment runs through Stripe. Your purchase generates a license key instantly, shown on the thank-you page and sent by email.

Your monitoring URLs and check results stay on your machine and are not uploaded to a central monitoring service. The desktop app sends the licence key, a stable device ID and the product identifier deskuptime-pro to a licence server over HTTPS when you enter the key. In version 0.2.7 that server is still the app's previous provider.

The open-source engine is MIT licensed. Review it on GitHub.

Download the desktop app

The DeskUptime desktop app is built and ready. Download the latest release for your platform:

Unzip and run. The app lives in your system tray — checks continue even when the window is closed. Pro license ($19) unlocks unlimited URLs, system tray background monitoring, and email/webhook alerts. Free tier monitors up to 3 URLs with no license key.

The CLI and watch mode are also ready today. Same engine, different interface:

Related: Check SSL Certificate Expiry from the Command Line

See DeskUptime →