How it works
A monitor in five plain steps. No account, no data left behind, and a free tier you can run right now without paying anything.
Build your monitor
Point it at what you want watched — a website or API (HTTP), a port (TCP), a name (DNS), a certificate (SSL), a blockchain RPC, an A2A agent or MCP server. Then set two things with sliders: how often to check and how long to run. That's the whole core configuration; a 12-year-old can size it.
Shape the schedule (optional)
Only want checks during business hours, or only on certain days? Add a daily active window in 24-hour UTC (say 08:00–20:00) and tick a day-of-week mask — any pattern, from Mon–Fri to Fri–Sat to a six-day week. Then choose how long the pattern runs: repeat for N weeks or run until a date. Scheduling only ever reduces the number of checks, so it can only lower the price.
See the live price — or "Free"
As you drag, the builder shows the exact total: the number of checks your schedule adds up to, times $0.0005 each, in USDC — updated live before you commit to anything. Stay within the free floors and it just says Free. Push the interval faster or add targets past the free limit and you watch "Free" become a real number, right on the slider — the most honest paywall there is.
Pay once in USDC — or run it free
Every order gets its own single-use payment address, shown three ways: a QR code to scan, a one-tap wallet link, and a copy amount / copy address pair. You send one USDC payment for exactly that monitoring, and it dispatches automatically the moment the payment confirms. No subscription, no card, no account, no wallet linking. If your monitor fits inside the free tier, there's no payment step at all — it just runs.
We probe on schedule, fan results to you — then forget you
PingDog runs the probe and hands you each result at your chosen cadence, alerting you the moment your target goes down. Your monitor keeps a verifiable, signed history you can check against our public key, plus a public status view. When your monitoring is done, your data decays to a hashed, non-personal aggregate and is fully erased — you keep the proof, we keep nothing about you.
Poll once, fan out
This is the idea that makes PingDog both cheap and safe. When many people watch the same target, PingDog does not run one probe stream per customer — it runs one shared stream and fans every result out to everyone due for it.
What you pay for
You are billed per result delivered to you at your cadence — not per network probe. If you buy "tell me X's status every 5 minutes," you receive exactly that, at a fixed price, no matter how few real probes it took behind the scenes.
What the target sees
One probe stream, regardless of how many customers watch it. The fan-out is the anti-abuse: monitoring a busy service through PingDog can never become a customer-multiplied storm against it.
The free tier
The free tier isn't a locked demo — it's the same builder, in its zero-cost range. Stay within the free floors and the monitor runs with no payment and no wallet at all.
It's meant for exactly what it sounds like: a real, honest way to watch a few things — and to check PingDog itself — before you ever send a payment. When you need faster checks or more targets, turn the sliders up and pay once for that monitoring.
Prepaid, durable, then gone
A schedule is a future commitment you pay for once, up front. Nothing recurs and nothing auto-charges — "20 weeks" is just a shape for the checks, not a renewal.
Those schedule records are long-lived and durable: they survive infrastructure churn so the monitoring you paid for keeps firing on time. And they carry no identity — your access is an opaque key, your recovery email (if you give one) is used only for a magic link, and everything is erased when your monitoring ends. Durability where it protects your purchase; erasure everywhere it protects you.
Ready when you are
Start on the free tier — no payment, no account. Turn the sliders up whenever you need faster checks or more targets.