Monitor your side project for free — complete setup guide
You built something. Maybe it's a tool that 50 people use. Maybe it's a weekend project that somehow grew into something real. Either way, you probably don't have monitoring on it. And when it goes down at 2pm on a Wednesday while you're at your day job, your users find out before you do.
Why side projects need monitoring (more than you think)
"It's just a side project" is the most common reason people skip monitoring. But side projects fail in ways that production apps don't, precisely because they get less attention.
What you get on Uptrack's free plan
Most free monitoring tiers are designed to frustrate you into upgrading. Five monitors at 5-minute intervals with email-only alerts. That's barely enough to monitor one project. Uptrack's free tier is designed to actually be useful.
5 monitors
Enough for a side project's critical endpoints. Monitor your landing page, app, API, and background jobs all from one account.
30-second checks
All 5 monitors run at 30-second intervals. No speed tiers, no slot management — every monitor gets the fastest check interval for maximum detection speed.
Status pages
Create a public status page for your project. When users ask "is it down?", point them to your status page instead of answering individually. Included free.
Cron monitoring
Monitor your scheduled tasks and background jobs. If your daily email cron or weekly data sync stops running, you'll know immediately instead of discovering it weeks later.
Multi-channel alerts
Email, Slack, Discord, and webhook alerts. Not limited to "email only" on free like some competitors. Get notified wherever you actually look.
Consecutive-check confirmation
No false alerts. Every plan, including free, uses consecutive- check confirmation. You only get alerted when something is actually broken, not when the internet hiccups.
Step-by-step: monitor your side project in 10 minutes
Here's exactly how to set up comprehensive monitoring for a typical side project. We'll assume your project has a landing page, an app, an API, and a background job.
Create your Uptrack account
Go to uptrack.app and sign up. No credit card needed. You'll have access to all 5 monitors immediately.
Add your homepage monitor (1-min interval)
Click "Create Monitor." Paste your homepage URL. Set the check interval to 1 minute — this is your most important page, so give it the fastest detection. Set expected status code to 200. Add a body assertion for your site's name or headline to catch blank-page errors.
Example configuration
URL: https://myproject.com
Method: GET
Interval: 1 minute
Status code: 200
Body contains: "MyProject - Build faster"Add your app and API monitors (1-min interval)
If your app runs separately from your landing page, monitor it independently. Add your app URL and your API health endpoint. Use 1-minute checks for both — these are your most critical endpoints. That's 3 of your 5 available 1-minute monitors used.
API health check example
URL: https://api.myproject.com/health
Method: GET
Interval: 1 minute
Status code: 200
Body contains: "status":"ok"Add secondary pages (2-min and 3-min intervals)
Monitor your pricing page, documentation, blog, or any other pages that matter. Use 2-minute intervals for important secondary pages and 3-minute intervals for everything else. You have 5 monitors total, all running at 30-second intervals.
Set up cron monitoring for background jobs
Create a cron monitor for each scheduled task. Uptrack gives you a unique URL to ping from your cron job. If the ping doesn't arrive on schedule, you get alerted. Add a simple HTTP call at the end of your job.
Add to your cron job script
# At the end of your cron job:
curl -fsS --retry 3 https://uptrack.app/ping/YOUR_CRON_ID
# Or in Node.js:
await fetch("https://uptrack.app/ping/YOUR_CRON_ID")
# Or in Python:
requests.get("https://uptrack.app/ping/YOUR_CRON_ID")Configure your alert channels
Set up at least two alert channels. Email as a fallback, plus Slack or Discord for instant notifications. If you have a project Discord server, add a #monitoring channel and connect Uptrack's Discord integration. Your users can see you take reliability seriously.
Create a status page
Go to the Status Pages section and create one. Add your critical monitors to it. Share the URL in your app's footer or help docs. When users report issues, they can check the status page first. This saves you from answering "is the site down?" messages at 2am.
How to allocate your 5 free monitors
Here's a practical allocation strategy for a typical side project stack. Adjust based on what matters most for your specific project.
| Tier | Interval | Count | Suggested use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast | 1 min | 5 | Homepage, app dashboard, API health, payment endpoint, login page |
| Medium | 2 min | 5 | Pricing page, docs, blog, second project homepage, webhook endpoint |
| Standard | 3 min | 10 | Third-party dependencies, secondary pages, additional projects, cron monitors |
If you have multiple side projects, distribute monitors across them. Split monitors across projects based on priority. Prioritize the project with actual users or revenue.
Hosting-specific monitoring tips
Vercel / Netlify (static sites)
These rarely go down, but edge function cold starts can cause timeouts. Monitor your server-rendered routes and API routes specifically, not just the static homepage. Set a response time threshold to catch cold start issues.
Railway / Render / Fly.io
Free and hobby tiers often hibernate after inactivity. Your monitoring checks double as keep-alive pings — with 1-minute checks, your app stays warm. Monitor the health endpoint, not just the root URL, to catch database connection failures after hibernation wake-up.
VPS (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode)
You manage everything. SSL renewals, process crashes, disk space, memory. Monitor your app endpoint plus set up a cron monitor for any scheduled maintenance scripts. If your VPS runs out of disk space, your app crashes with no automatic recovery.
Supabase / PlanetScale (managed DB)
Your database provider can go down independently from your app. Use a health endpoint that queries the database, not just returns a static response. If the health check hits the DB and returns OK, you know both your app and database are working.
What to do when you get an alert
You set up monitoring. Your phone buzzes. Now what? Here's a quick triage checklist for side project outages.
Check the Uptrack dashboard for error details (status code, response time, error message)
SSH into your server or check your hosting provider's dashboard for service status
Check your application logs for the root cause
If it's a deployment issue, roll back to the last working version
If it's a hosting provider outage, update your status page so users know
After resolving, check your monitor's history to see when the outage started and how long it lasted
Document what happened and what you'd do differently — even for side projects, a 30-second postmortem helps
Your Side Project Deserves Monitoring
5 monitors free — all at 30-second checks. No credit card required.
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