Self-host it, or let us run it
This page exists because the worst way to find out that a product has a paid tier is to hit it. So here is the whole picture, including the part that is held back.
Every monitoring feature is in the free version
MT-Uptime is AGPL-3.0. Not a crippled community edition — every monitor type, every notification channel, correlated incidents, maintenance windows, status pages, users and roles. It is a single binary of about 50 MB with no runtime to install and no external database, and it runs comfortably on a 1 GB VM. A Docker image is there if you'd rather.
We don't withhold monitoring features, for a straightforward reason: withholding them is what gets a project forked, and we don't need to. The hosted product has something a self-hoster cannot install their way out of.
What you actually pay for
An uptime monitor cannot monitor itself, and it dies with the infrastructure it watches. If it runs on your box, then the outage that takes your box down also takes down the thing whose job was to tell you. If it runs in your data centre, it cannot tell you your data centre is unreachable from the internet — only that it is reachable from inside itself.
That is the product. Not features: a vantage point outside your infrastructure, plus the operational work of keeping it there — backups you don't have to test, upgrades you don't have to schedule, and someone whose job is noticing when the monitor itself stops.
| Self-hosted | Hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Every monitor type | Yes | Yes |
| Every notification channel | Yes | Yes |
| Correlated incidents, maintenance windows, ack and mute | Yes | Yes |
| Public status pages | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited users, with roles | Yes | Yes |
| Watches from outside your infrastructure | Only if you rent a second machine | Yes |
| Managed backups and tested restores | Yours to build | Yes |
| Upgrades and security patching | Yours to run | Yes |
| Someone watching the watcher | No | Yes |
| White-label client status pages and branded SLA reports | Not planned — see below | Planned, hosted only |
| Price | Free, forever | $29/month |
The one thing we're holding back
Multi-client white-labelling — per-client branded status pages and monthly SLA reports for agencies and managed service providers — is planned as a hosted-only feature. It isn't built yet, in either version. When it is, it will not ship in the open-source engine.
That is a business-model feature rather than a monitoring feature: it exists to resell monitoring to your clients, and nobody self-hosting for their own infrastructure wants it. We think that's the right thing to hold back and the wrong thing to be quiet about, which is why it's written here rather than discovered later.
Moving either direction is real
The hosted product runs the same assemblies as the download — a different composition root, not a different build. So starting self-hosted and moving to us is not a migration onto a different product, and leaving us for your own box is not an escape hatch we've quietly made impractical.