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Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

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Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use multiple accounts to promote your business on HN.

It's not my business, I also can recommend the Uptime Kuma (selfhosted)...

What about your earlier Show HN post for the same service where you quote:

> I've created the best free website downtime checker. Don't trust me? Try it yourself.

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#23
post #3

Sounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.

Not OP, but part of the problem here is the "non-commercial use" restriction was a retroactive change to their terms of service. Their free plan previously had no such restriction. On November 4, they emailed free plan users describing an "Upcoming Change to UptimeRobot Free Plan ToS" which somehow already took effect on November 1. They aren't actually enforcing the change until December 1, but even then, that's sti…

What do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but part of the problem here is the "non-commercial use" restriction was a retroactive change to their terms of service. Their free plan previously had no such restriction. On November 4, they emailed free plan users describing an "Upcoming Change to UptimeRobot Free Plan ToS" which somehow already took effect on November 1. They aren't actually enforcing the change until December 1, but even then, that's sti…

What do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?

For starters, provide more than 26 days of notice about enforcing a major ToS change which effectively eliminates the free plan for many users. And don't send emails about an "upcoming" change which was already made to the ToS 3 days prior to the email being sent.

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think they should have done instead to ensure that you would trust this service?

For starters, provide more than 26 days of notice about enforcing a major ToS change which effectively eliminates the free plan for many users. And don't send emails about an "upcoming" change which was already made to the ToS 3 days prior to the email being sent.

What would have been the correct number of days notice?

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters, provide more than 26 days of notice about enforcing a major ToS change which effectively eliminates the free plan for many users. And don't send emails about an "upcoming" change which was already made to the ToS 3 days prior to the email being sent.

What would have been the correct number of days notice?

I'd certainly expect at least 30 days. Or more if the deadline lines up with a major holiday weekend, as this one does in the US!

Doing this with less than 30 day deadline means I won't trust the service again for any purpose, whether non-commercial or commercial. I'm perfectly happy to pay someone for this service if needed, but it certainly won't be Uptimerobot after this experience.

Why are you harping on about this?

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would have been the correct number of days notice?

I'd certainly expect at least 30 days. Or more if the deadline lines up with a major holiday weekend, as this one does in the US! Doing this with less than 30 day deadline means I won't trust the service again for any purpose, whether non-commercial or commercial. I'm perfectly happy to pay someone for this service if needed, but it certainly won't be Uptimerobot after this experience. Why are you harping on about th…

> Why are you harping on about this?

I’m pretty confident that if they’d given 30 days you’d say that 45 days was the minimum.

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd certainly expect at least 30 days. Or more if the deadline lines up with a major holiday weekend, as this one does in the US! Doing this with less than 30 day deadline means I won't trust the service again for any purpose, whether non-commercial or commercial. I'm perfectly happy to pay someone for this service if needed, but it certainly won't be Uptimerobot after this experience. Why are you harping on about th…

> Why are you harping on about this? I’m pretty confident that if they’d given 30 days you’d say that 45 days was the minimum.

I have no recollection of ever interacting with you before, so why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader? I really don't know what your problem is, but seriously you're way out of line. Do you work for Uptimerobot or something?

Not that it's any of your business, but I signed up for Uptimerobot only barely two months prior to receiving this email about the free plan change. I was using it as a secondary/auxiliary uptime monitoring service for my bootstrapped business, to supplement my primary monitoring. In that brief time, I had no actual outages, but Uptimerobot did have one false positive outage report where they claimed my site was down when it wasn't. So my overall impression of their service was already "need more time to see if this is worth paying for".

Upon then receiving notice that they would be terminating the free plan during Thanksgiving weekend with less than a month of notice, my impression changed to "never ever trust this service for anything". If they had instead offered a more reasonable time period, I would have seriously considered switching to a paid plan, assuming there were no further repeats of their false positive alerts.

I was only using Uptimerobot to monitor 2 sites, which means they were sending less than 600 tiny HEAD requests to my infra per day. The approximate cost of that to them should easily be less than one cent per month.

fwiw, my own product has a free version which has been downloaded over 2 million times and is used by several thousand companies, including some of the largest companies in the world who nonetheless pay me nothing. Despite that, there is no conceivable situation in which I would discontinue a free product with only 26 days notice, as that just pisses off users, flushes reputation down the toilet, and is completely counterproductive to improving revenue.

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#29
post #3

Sounds like it’s genuinely free…… if you’re using it for non commercial use.

Here are a lot of alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1g15gqe/uptimerob...

Why should people use just one tool all the time? There are many alternatives in this world, free as well.

Re: Tell HN: Uptimerobot.com offers a fake free plan

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you harping on about this? I’m pretty confident that if they’d given 30 days you’d say that 45 days was the minimum.

I have no recollection of ever interacting with you before, so why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader? I really don't know what your problem is, but seriously you're way out of line. Do you work for Uptimerobot or something? Not that it's any of your business, but I signed up for Uptimerobot only barely two months prior to receiving this email about the free plan change. I was using it as a secondary/…

> why are you repeatedly implying I'm a cheap freeloader?

Sorry, I’m implying that most people are cheap freeloaders.

> If they had instead offered a more reasonable time period, I would have seriously considered switching to a paid plan

Easy to say now that you’ve found a reason to justify not doing that.

> I was only using Uptimerobot to monitor 2 sites, which means they were sending less than 600 tiny HEAD requests to my infra per day. The approximate cost of that to them should easily be less than one cent per month.

Whether it’s easily less than one cent per month or not, it’s more than the zero cents you were paying them.

> there is no conceivable situation in which I would discontinue a free product with only 26 days notice

Try conceiving harder. Of course there are situations when you’d discontinue a free product with 26 days notice.

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