Freshping Alternative After the Shutdown: What to Move To
Short version. Freshworks shut Freshping down on 6 March 2026: free accounts stopped checking that day, paid plans ran out their billing period, and freshping.io now redirects to the Freshworks home page rather than a product page. There is no replacement from Freshworks. What you move to depends on what you were using it for. If you need dozens of checks at one-minute intervals and a public status page, go to a dedicated free-tier service and this page will name them. If you were watching a handful of sites and wanted an alert on your phone, PingKit's Uptime Watch covers that with no account and no dashboard. One URL is free, permanently, checked hourly. Guardian watches ten, every five minutes.
What Happened
Freshworks discontinued Freshping on 6 March 2026. Free accounts stopped monitoring on that date, paid plans continued to the end of their billing period and did not renew, and account data was removed roughly ninety days later. Freshworks did not ship a replacement and its guidance amounted to finding another monitoring service. Today freshping.io redirects to the Freshworks home page, not to a product page, which is the usual sign that a product is not coming back.
That leaves a lot of people with an empty slot in their tooling and a set of URLs they used to have watched. The useful question is not "what is the closest clone" but "what were you actually getting from it", because the honest answers differ.
What Were You Using It For?
| What you had it doing | What to move to |
|---|---|
| Dozens of checks at one-minute intervals, for a business | A dedicated uptime service with a free or cheap tier. UptimeRobot and StatusCake are the two most people land on. Not us: five-minute checking is not a substitute for one-minute checking |
| A public status page for customers | Same. PingKit has no status page feature at all |
| Slack or email alerts into a team channel | Possibly PingKit, on Guardian Plus: every alert can also go to one email address and one webhook, and a Slack or Discord incoming webhook accepts it as it is. There is no escalation or on-call rota, so a team that needs those wants a dedicated service |
| Three to ten URLs, and you wanted to know when one broke | PingKit's Uptime Watch. Every five minutes, push to your iPhone, no account, ten targets on Guardian at $2.99 a month |
| One personal site, watched for free | PingKit's Uptime Watch. One target free, permanently, checked hourly |
| Certificate expiry warnings | PingKit's Cert Monitor. One domain free, 5 on Guardian, 50 on Guardian Plus. The reading is taken by the app, so keep a Mac Agent running or open the app regularly |
| A home server or NAS that is not on the public internet | Neither, on its own. Nothing on the internet can check a private address. The free PingKit Agent for Mac watches the LAN instead |
If your row says "not us", take that at face value. A monitoring tool that oversells its interval is worse than no monitoring tool, because you stop checking manually.
One URL watched free, permanently, with push notifications and no account. Get PingKit for iPhone
If PingKit Is Your Row, Here Is Exactly What You Get
- A check per target every five minutes with Guardian, or hourly for the free target, from Cloudflare's network, with a 10-second timeout, redirects followed.
- A target is a website over HTTP or HTTPS, or with Guardian a TCP port on a public host.
- Final status 200 to 399 is up; anything else, or a timeout, is down. With Guardian a website target can also require a keyword on the page (case-sensitive, exact text) or an exact status code.
- A push notification to your iPhone when a target goes down, and again when it recovers. With Guardian Plus the same alerts also go by email, with a summary every Monday, and to a webhook.
- 7 days of results per target on the free tier, 30 days with Guardian, each with an hourly response-time chart.
- One URL is free, permanently. Guardian watches ten. No account, no login, no web dashboard.
And what you do not get, so there are no surprises: no one-minute checks, no multi-region checking, no ICMP or DNS checks, no multi-step or scripted checks, no status page, no team alerting or escalation, no SMS, and no email or webhook alerts below Guardian Plus. Keyword checks and TCP ports are Guardian; the free target is an hourly status check.
The Migration, If You Are Moving to PingKit
- Take your Freshping URL list out of whatever you saved before the shutdown, or rebuild it from your own bookmarks. The data itself is long gone.
- Rank the list. You have one free slot and ten with Guardian, so the exercise is deciding which failures you genuinely want to hear about at 2am.
- Add the top targets in the Monitor tab under Uptime Watch, with labels you will recognise in a notification.
- Allow notifications when iOS asks.
- Check each target's history after the first few checks. A target that reads as down while it works in a browser usually means a wrong URL, a keyword with different capitalisation, or a server that only answers some networks, and you want to find that out now rather than during an incident.
- Add your domains to Cert Monitor as well. Expiry at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days is the alert most people did not have set up in Freshping either. Note that the certificate reading is taken by the app rather than by a server, so it needs a Mac Agent running, or the app opened every few hours, to stay current.
A Note on Free Tiers That Disappear
Freshping was free because it was a funnel for other Freshworks products. That is a perfectly reasonable way to run a product, and it is also why it ended: when the wider portfolio was simplified, a tool with no revenue of its own was an easy cut. It is worth asking of any free monitoring tier what it is for, and what happens to your checks when that reason stops being true.
PingKit's answer is not that we are more virtuous. It is that the free Uptime Watch target exists inside a paid app: the subscription pays for the checks, the free slot is the thing that convinces people the subscription works, and there is a direct commercial reason for it to keep existing.
Honest Limits
- Five-minute checks with Guardian, hourly on the free tier. If you were relying on Freshping's one-minute interval, this is a real downgrade and you should use a dedicated service instead.
- No public status page and no team alerting. Notifications go to your own devices.
- A status check proves an answer, not a correct page. A Guardian keyword check gets closer, but only for one piece of text on one page.
- Uptime Watch cannot see a private address. LAN-only services need the Mac Agent.
- The Freshping dates above are the shutdown as announced and reported; the product's own pages are no longer available to check against.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Freshping shut down?
Yes. Freshworks discontinued Freshping on 6 March 2026. Free accounts stopped monitoring on that date, paid plans ran to the end of their billing period, and account data was removed roughly ninety days later. There is no replacement product from Freshworks, and freshping.io now redirects to the Freshworks home page.
What is the best Freshping alternative?
It depends on what you used it for. For dozens of checks at one-minute intervals with a status page, a dedicated uptime service such as UptimeRobot or StatusCake is the right move. For a handful of URLs where you just want your phone to tell you, PingKit's Uptime Watch pushes to your iPhone, with one target free (checked hourly) and ten on a $2.99 subscription (checked every five minutes).
Is there a free Freshping replacement?
Nothing replaces Freshping's free tier at the same scale. Several services have free tiers with fewer checks or longer intervals, and PingKit watches one URL free permanently. Be sceptical of anything claiming a like-for-like free replacement.
Can I still get my Freshping data?
No. Account data was deleted around ninety days after the March 2026 shutdown. If you did not export your check list before then, you will be rebuilding it by hand.
Does PingKit have a status page like Freshping did?
No. PingKit has no public status page feature. It notifies your own devices, and with Guardian Plus an email address and a webhook you choose, and keeps results per target in the app: 7 days on the free tier, 30 days with Guardian.
Put the important URLs back under watch.
One URL is free, permanently, checked hourly. Guardian watches ten, every five minutes. Guardian is $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year, with a 1-week free trial.
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