Uptime · checked 2026-10-20

Can I vibecode Pingdom?

YES· one-shottable

For a handful of your own sites, a monitor is a scheduler, an HTTP client, a results table and an alert hook, and an agent writes that in one sitting; a Playwright script covers the click-through transaction checks. Pingdom's price goes to what a single machine can't fake: probes in several countries that agree an outage is real, SMS and email delivered by someone else's infrastructure, and a monitor that doesn't share a fate with the site it watches. Put the checker on a different provider, add a second small box as a second location, and the gap for personal use shrinks to SMS and real-user data.

$18/moprice

$216you'd save a year

one sittingbuild time

—people replaced it

Before you start

What you need on hand.

DifficultyIntermediate · Some system setup or keys.

TimeOne to two hours, plus a few minutes to set up the second location

Claude Code, Codex or CursorAny of them can run the prompt.
Node.js 22better-sqlite3 compiles a native module, so build tools must be installed.
A small server at another providerA $4-6 VPS or a Raspberry Pi at home; a monitor on the same host as the site goes down with it.
SMTP credentials and an ntfy topicFree tiers cover one person's alerts.
Playwright browsersOnly for transaction checks: `npx playwright install chromium`.

Before you buildPingdom has no free plan, only a 14-day trial. If you just want uptime and a status page, Uptime Kuma is free and does it today; build your own only for the transaction checks and second-location logic.

1. Install one agent: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor.
2. Make an empty folder and open it in the agent.
3. Paste the prompt below, press enter, and answer its questions as it builds.

The prompt

Build me a self-hosted site monitor to replace Pingdom for my own websites. Requirements:

- Node.js 22 + TypeScript: one Fastify process. `npm start` serves the admin on http://localhost:4880
  and a read-only public status page at /status. A scheduler inside the process runs the checks.
- Storage: better-sqlite3 in ./data/monitor.db: checks (name, URL, method, expected status,
  optional keyword that must appear, interval 1 or 5 minutes, timeout), results (time, ok, status
  code, milliseconds, error text) and incidents (check, started, ended).
- Uptime check: an `undici` request per check. Retry once after 10 seconds before counting a failure;
  declare an outage after 2 failed runs in a row and recovery after 2 good ones. Warn when the TLS
  certificate expires within 14 days (read it with `node:tls`).
- Transaction checks: each file in ./checks/*.spec.ts is a Playwright script (open a page, log in
  with credentials from .env, assert some text) run headless every 15 minutes; save a screenshot
  to ./data/shots on failure.
- Alerts: email through nodemailer SMTP and a push message to an ntfy topic, both configured in .env,
  on outage and on recovery. No SMS.
- Second location: `MODE=probe` runs the checks on another small server and POSTs the results to
  /api/ingest with a bearer token. A check only counts as down when this machine and the probe both fail.
- Status page: current state per check, a 90-day strip of daily uptime percentages and the incident list.
  Admin: one password in .env (signed cookie) to add, pause and edit checks, with a response-time chart.
- Single user. No accounts, no telemetry, local-first. Outbound calls: the URLs I monitor, SMTP, ntfy and the probe.
- Out of scope: real user monitoring, SMS, a network of many regions, teams and roles.
- README: running it under systemd or Docker, why it must live at a different provider than the sites it
  watches, and how to back up data/monitor.db.

Opens your agent with the prompt filled in, you press enter. Or copy it and paste it into an empty folder.

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Then keep going

Next prompts, same folder.

The first prompt builds the core. Run these one at a time in the same folder to grow it into your own Pingdom.

Add a Pingdom importer to the site monitor in this folder. Requirements:

- A command `npm run import:pingdom` that reads PINGDOM_API_TOKEN from .env and lists the account's checks
  through the Pingdom API 3.1 (Bearer token); look up the checks endpoint in the OpenAPI spec
  downloaded from https://docs.pingdom.com/api/ and keep the spec in ./docs.
- Map each HTTP check to a monitor check (URL, expected status, keyword, interval rounded to 1 or 5
  minutes) and print the ones it cannot map, such as transaction and TCP checks.
- Dry run by default; `--apply` writes the checks, skipping any URL that already exists.
- Update the README.

Add page-speed tracking to the site monitor in this folder. Requirements:

- Once a day per check flagged `speed`, run the `lighthouse` CLI in headless Chromium (mobile preset)
  and store the performance score, LCP, CLS and total byte weight in SQLite.
- Show a 30-day chart per URL on the admin page and alert when the score drops 15 points below its
  7-day average.
- Cap it at 10 URLs and run them one after another, never in parallel.
- Update the README with how much CPU a run uses.

Add a weekly report to the site monitor in this folder. Requirements:

- Every Monday at 08:00 in the timezone from .env, email an HTML summary: uptime percentage per check
  for the last 7 days, number and length of incidents, slowest day and average response time.
- Render the same report at /report/latest so it can be opened in a browser, and keep the last 12 reports.
- Plain inline CSS only, so it looks right in common mail clients.
- A `--send-now` flag for testing.
- Update the README.

What you lose

Probes spread over many countries that confirm an outage before alerting
SMS alerts through a carrier-grade gateway
Real User Monitoring: timings from your visitors' actual browsers
A hosted public status page that stays up when your own servers don't
Someone else keeping the monitor itself running at 3 a.m.

Why people still pay

A monitor is only useful if it works on the day everything else is broken, so many teams prefer a service that lives on someone else's network and has a track record. Pingdom is a name that clients and managers already recognise, and the per-check plans are easy to expense. Moving existing checks, alert contacts and reports elsewhere is also a chore nobody schedules.

Moatinfrastructure scale execution polish brand & trust

Do the math

Pingdom or your own copy?

Over

Your usage

Count my time3h ×$/h

Pingdom, 1 yr$216

Your own copy, 1 yr$68running + build session

You keep$149pays for itself in the first month

Estimate · A home server costs nothing; two small VPSes at different providers run about $8-10 a month. SMTP and ntfy fit free tiers. The build is token usage on your agent plan.

Leaving Pingdom

Take your data, then cancel.

1 · Take your data out of Pingdom

1Create an API token in My Pingdom: version 3.1 of the API authenticates with a Bearer token instead of your login.
2Use the API to list your checks and save the JSON before you cancel; its OpenAPI 3.0 spec can be downloaded from the API documentation page.
3We could not read the API reference itself (it needs JavaScript), so check it for the exact endpoints for checks and results history.
4Write down alert contacts, maintenance windows and status-page settings by hand: we found no export for them.

2 · Cancel Pingdom

1Only an owner or administrator can cancel. Open the Subscriptions page in your Pingdom settings.
2Click Cancel subscription in the Current subscription pane.
3You and your organization's users lose access to Pingdom and billing stops.
4Still on a trial? It deactivates itself when it ends; to stop sooner, open Preferences and click Delete account.

The cancellation article doesn't say whether access continues until the end of an annual term, so ask support before you cancel a year you've already paid for.
Cancelling a subscription doesn't delete the organization or its data; for that you have to contact support.
Run the replacement next to Pingdom for a week or two and compare the outages each one reports before you switch off alerts.
Update the status-page address on your site and in customer emails if you used a Pingdom-hosted page.

Checked 2026-10-20 against Pingdom's docs: 1, 2, 3, 4

The escape hatch

Don't feel like building it? These are already free.

Uptime KumaOpen sourceMIT-licensed self-hosted monitor with HTTP, TCP, DNS and Docker checks, many alert channels and public status pages.★ 93k · active Oct 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗GatusOpen sourceApache-2.0 status page and health dashboard configured from a YAML file, with conditions per endpoint and alerting.★ 12k · active Oct 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗UpptimeOpen sourceMIT-licensed monitor and status page that runs on GitHub Actions, so there is no server to keep alive.★ 17k · active Oct 2026 · they host it
WebVisit ↗

All 5 free alternatives to Pingdom ›

The numbers

Pingdom pricing

Plan	Monthly	Annual, per month	What you get
Synthetic: 10 uptime + 1 advanced checks	$18	$16.50	10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS alerts, email alerting, maintenance windows, public status pages, unlimited users.
Synthetic: 25 uptime + 4 advanced checks	$40	$36.33	25 uptime checks, 4 advanced checks, 100 SMS alerts.
Synthetic: 50 uptime + 10 advanced checks	$78	$71.50	50 uptime checks, 10 advanced checks, 200 SMS alerts.
Real User Monitoring: 100,000 pageviews	$18	$16.50	100,000 pageviews, unlimited sites and users, shareable reports, performance filtering, 13-month data retention.
Enterprise	custom	—	500K to over 5M pageviews a month.

Billing: A calculator on the pricing page lets you pick annual or monthly payment; annual is about 8% cheaper. There is a 14-day free trial that covers Synthetics and RUM, per Pingdom's API page.
Hidden costs: Uptime checks and advanced checks are counted separately. The pricing page doesn't define 'advanced', but transaction and page-speed monitoring are the features it lists beyond plain uptime, so a login flow plus a few speed tests would exhaust the single advanced check of the cheapest tier. SMS credits are bundled in fixed amounts per tier. Real User Monitoring is a second subscription.
Source: www.pingdom.com

Also on the list

Better Stack$34/mo · UptimeYES

Checkly$29/mo · MonitoringYES

Airtable$24/mo · DatabasesYES

Questions

Pingdom, briefly

Not answered here? Tell us and we'll add it.

Ask a question ›

Yes. An AI coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can build a usable personal version in one session with the prompt on this page, running on your own machine.

About $18 a month on the Synthetic Monitoring, smallest tier plan, $216 a year (checked 2026-10-20).

Probes spread over many countries that confirm an outage before alerting; SMS alerts through a carrier-grade gateway; Real User Monitoring: timings from your visitors' actual browsers; A hosted public status page that stays up when your own servers don't; Someone else keeping the monitor itself running at 3 a.m.. If any of those matter to you, keep paying.