Announcing PingKit 2.0 & Guardian Plus

By Paul Snyman · Published April 8, 2026 · 7 min read

PingKit started as a set of free network tools. Version 1.3 made all 19 tools free forever and introduced Guardian for AI intelligence and Mac monitoring. Today we are taking the next step. PingKit 2.0 launches Guardian Plus - a new premium tier for anyone who needs certificate monitoring at scale, compliance evidence, and scheduled, branded reports.

Guardian is not going away. Everything you have today stays exactly the same at $2.99/month. Guardian Plus sits on top of it and adds five new capabilities that ops teams, freelance developers, and security-conscious users have been requesting since we launched.

Cert Monitor: SSL Certificate Monitoring on Your iPhone

PingKit's SSL Inspector has always let you check any certificate on demand. Cert Monitor makes that automatic. Add domains to your watch list and PingKit checks their TLS certificates on a schedule you choose - hourly, every six hours, or daily.

When a certificate is within your configured expiry threshold (default 14 days), uses a weak cipher suite, or fails chain validation, you get a push notification on your iPhone. If you are running the Mac Agent, it performs the checks even when your iPhone is asleep.

Update, September 2026: Cert Monitor's limits have changed since launch. One domain is free, Guardian now watches five, and Guardian Plus watches 50, up from the 25 it launched with.

Use case: You manage five client sites on different hosting providers. One of them silently fails its Let's Encrypt auto-renewal. Cert Monitor catches the expiring certificate 14 days before it goes red and notifies you before any visitor sees a browser warning.

Uptime Watch

Update: Uptime Watch has moved to the Guardian tier and is now available to all Guardian subscribers at $2.99/mo.

Uptime Watch sends an HTTP HEAD request to each of your endpoints once an hour from Cloudflare's network, and keeps the status code and response time for 30 days. When an endpoint answers with a 4xx or a 5xx, or fails to respond inside the 10-second timeout, you get a push notification on your iPhone at that check, and another when it recovers.

This is not a replacement for a full monitoring service like Datadog or Uptime Robot. It is a lightweight alternative with no account to create and no monthly SaaS bill on top of your subscription; the checks and their results live on PingKit's own backend.

Update, September 2026: The two paragraphs above describe Uptime Watch as it launched. As of PingKit 3.1, one URL is watched free, checked hourly with 7 days of history, and Guardian and Guardian Plus watch ten targets every five minutes with 30 days of history. A Guardian target can be a website or a TCP port, with an optional keyword or expected status code, and the checks run on PingKit's backend on Cloudflare, so your devices can be off.

ISO 27001 PDF Export

If your company follows ISO 27001 or any framework that requires evidence of cryptographic controls, you know the pain of manually documenting certificate inventories. Guardian Plus generates a timestamped PDF covering every domain you monitor: issuer, subject, SANs, expiry date, key size, signature algorithm, and TLS version.

Hand it to your auditor as evidence for Annex A.12. Export it from your iPhone any time and share it via email, AirDrop, or any sharing extension. We wrote a detailed guide on how this maps to the ISO 27001 controls.

Apple Watch Complication (Free on Every Tier)

PingKit ships a complication for Apple Watch that shows your current network status at a glance: healthy, minor issues, or a problem, derived from the last check your iPhone ran. It is free on every tier, including the free one, and it is a glanceable status face rather than an alerting channel: it does not push cert expiries, endpoint failures or new-device notices to your wrist.

Apple Private Cloud Compute

Guardian answers the questions too large for the model on your iPhone to hold on its own using Apple Private Cloud Compute, and Guardian Plus includes it. The assistant, security explanations, fix-it guides and scan summaries all run on your iPhone first, where they are free and unlimited on every tier including the free one, and reach for Private Cloud Compute only when the question is bigger than the device can hold.

Pricing

Guardian Plus is $9.99/month or $79.99/year (save 33%) on iPhone and iPad, and $4.99/month on Mac. It includes a 1-week free trial so you can set everything up and decide before being charged. Guardian remains available at $2.99/month or $24.99/year and now includes Uptime Watch alongside AI, Mac monitoring, and smart alerts.

All 19 iOS tools remain completely free with no ads, no limits, and no account required. That has not changed and never will.

Existing Guardian subscribers: Upgrade to Guardian Plus any time from the Subscription screen of the app you subscribed in, and the App Store prorates your billing cycle. Bought on your other device, Guardian Plus is a separate subscription, so cancel the first one where you bought it.

What Comes Next

PingKit 2.0 is the foundation for a monitoring platform, not just a toolkit. We are already working on webhook integrations, Slack and Teams notifications, multi-user domain sharing, and an API for CI/CD pipelines. Guardian Plus subscribers will get these features as they ship, at no additional cost.

PingKit 2.0 is available now on the App Store.

Try Guardian Plus Free for 1 Week

Cert Monitor (50 domains), the signed ISO 27001 PDF, and scheduled, branded reports. See your network like never before.

Download Free on the App Store