Freshping shut down — here's what to do next

What happened

Freshworks' new CEO (Dennis Woodside, appointed 2024) is simplifying the product portfolio. Freshping was free, generated no revenue, and was the first to go. Their official statement: "We have evaluated our business priorities and have decided that supporting Freshping is no longer part of our go forward plan."

Freshping was generous — 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals with 5 status pages, all free. No current alternative matches that exact combination.

Your options (honest assessment)

1. UptimeRobot ($0-7/mo)

The biggest name in budget monitoring. 50 free monitors at 5-minute intervals. But there's a catch: since November 2024, the free plan is for personal, non-commercial use only. If you're monitoring business sites, you need their Solo plan at $7/month for just 10 monitors. The pricing doesn't match what you had with Freshping.

2. Pulsetic ($0-9/mo)

Modern UI, unlimited status pages on free tier, 10 free monitors at 5-minute intervals. The Solo plan ($9/mo) gets you 1-minute checks. Good option if you value beautiful status pages.

3. Uptime Kuma (free, self-hosted)

The open-source darling. Unlimited monitors, completely free. But you need a VPS to run it, and you're responsible for keeping it running — which creates a chicken-and-egg problem. If your monitoring server goes down, who monitors the monitor?

4. OpenPing ($0-15/mo)

Full disclosure: this is us. 25 free monitors at 3-minute intervals, with a status page and email alerts. Commercial use is explicitly allowed. The Pro plan ($5/mo) gives you 50 monitors with 1-minute checks — roughly what Freshping offered, for the cost of a coffee.

We built OpenPing specifically because of the Freshping shutdown. Our free tier has fewer monitors (25 vs 50), but it's honest — we designed it to be sustainable, not to attract users with an unsustainable offer that gets killed later.

How to migrate

Unfortunately, no tool offers a direct Freshping import. The Freshping API is already offline. Your options:

1. If you have a list of your URLs:Use OpenPing's bulk import — paste all your URLs at once and we'll create monitors for each one.
2. If you don't remember all your URLs: Check your email for old Freshping alerts — they contain the monitored URLs. Or check your browser bookmarks for the Freshping dashboard.

The lesson

Free tools inside large companies are always at risk. Freshping generated no revenue for Freshworks. When profitability became the priority, it was the first cut. The same could happen to any free product that doesn't have its own business model.

When evaluating alternatives, look for tools where the free tier is part of a sustainable business model (paid plans subsidize it), not a marketing cost that could be cut.