An honest Oh Dear alternative
Oh Dear is a full monitoring suite, priced like one. Upcheck is the four core checks — uptime, SSL certificate, DNS, domain — at utility pricing: 10 websites for $20 a month instead of $55. This page lists what you give up for the difference.
$10/month base · $1 per website · every feature at every size
You pay Oh Dear for its breadth — every month, used or not
Oh Dear deserves its reputation. Every feature ships on every plan, outages are confirmed before anyone is paged, and the feature list runs from cron monitoring to daily Lighthouse scores to branded client reports. It is the right tool for an agency that resells monitoring, and it is priced for that buyer: $17 a month covers two sites, $55 covers ten, $165 covers fifty.
Most teams use a fraction of that surface. What actually takes their sites down is the same four things it has always been — the server stops answering, the certificate expires, a DNS record changes, the domain registration lapses. Upcheck watches exactly those four, and prices them like a utility: $10 for the workspace, $1 per website, every feature at every size — the pricing philosophy Oh Dear itself argues for, applied to a smaller, cheaper product.
Oh Dear vs Upcheck, feature by feature
Oh Dear details read from ohdear.app, its pricing and features pages, September 2026. Their plans change — check theirs before deciding on numbers alone.
The same website counts, both bills
Upcheck's per-website dollar covers all four checks on the site — uptime every 5 minutes, the certificate every 12 hours, DNS every 6, the domain daily — and is metered by the day, so a website added mid-cycle costs only the days it was tracked.
What each check does has its own page — see website uptime monitoring, DNS monitoring, and domain expiration monitoring.
Four reasons to stay with Oh Dear
The price difference buys nothing if it removes a feature you rely on. Stay if any of these is you.
- 01
You use the breadth
Cron job monitoring, broken-link crawling, daily Lighthouse scores, application health endpoints — if these are load-bearing in your operation, Oh Dear earns its price and Upcheck does not replace it.
- 02
Clients see your monitoring
Oh Dear's branded status pages and automated monthly client reports are built for agencies that resell monitoring as part of a care plan. Upcheck has neither.
- 03
A minute of detection matters
Oh Dear probes every minute from multiple locations. Upcheck probes every 5 minutes from one, trading speed and geography for a confirmed, calm alert. If your SLA is written in seconds, that trade is wrong for you.
- 04
Alerts must ring a phone
Oh Dear speaks SMS, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie natively. Upcheck's webhook can drive a paging tool, but nothing rings out of the box.
Frequently asked questions
Is Upcheck cheaper than Oh Dear?
For the same website count, substantially: 10 websites cost $20 per month on Upcheck against $55 on Oh Dear, and 50 cost $60 against $165. But the products are not the same size. Oh Dear bundles cron monitoring, broken-link crawling, Lighthouse runs, status pages, and client reports into every plan, and its uptime checks run every minute from multiple locations. Upcheck is cheaper because it does less — deliberately. The question is whether the extra product is one you use.
What does Oh Dear have that Upcheck doesn't?
Cron job monitoring, broken-link and mixed-content crawling, daily Lighthouse performance runs, application health endpoints, AI-driven flow checks, branded status pages, automated client reports, SMS and PagerDuty and Opsgenie alerting, and 1-minute multi-location uptime checks. If any of those is load-bearing for you, stay with Oh Dear — it is a good product priced for its breadth.
What do Upcheck and Oh Dear do the same way?
The philosophy, mostly. Both confirm an outage before alerting anyone rather than paging on a single blip, and both refuse to gate features by tier — every feature is on every plan. Both watch the four slow and fast ways a website dies: downtime, an expired SSL certificate, changed DNS, a lapsed domain registration. Upcheck agrees with Oh Dear about how monitoring should behave, and disagrees about how much product to bundle around it.
How often does Upcheck check compared to Oh Dear?
Oh Dear probes uptime every minute from multiple locations. Upcheck probes every 5 minutes from Cloudflare's edge and confirms an outage with a second failed probe, so a confirmed alert takes about ten minutes at worst. Certificates are checked every 12 hours, DNS every 6, and the domain registration daily — the same cadence tiering Oh Dear applies to its own non-uptime checks.
Does Upcheck monitor cron jobs or scheduled tasks?
No. Upcheck monitors websites from the outside — uptime, SSL certificate, DNS, and domain registration — and has no inbound heartbeat endpoint for cron jobs to ping. Oh Dear's cron monitoring is genuinely useful if you run scheduled jobs that must not silently stop; nothing on this page substitutes for it.
What does switching from Oh Dear to Upcheck involve?
Adding your websites and pointing alert rules at a channel. There is no agent and no code to deploy — each probe is a real HTTPS request from outside, so the first verdict arrives seconds after a website is added. Alert rules can cover the whole workspace or specific websites, and email recipients live in reusable named lists. Budget an hour for a modest portfolio, most of it deciding who gets woken by what.
The four checks that matter, at a third the bill.
Add the websites you own, decide who hears about what, and let the probes run.