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Hyperping alternative — free uptime checks armed from a terminal, no signup

Hyperping (an independent Paris-based company whose homepage carries an endorsement from Vercel's CEO) has one of the stronger free tiers in uptime monitoring: 20 monitors at 5-minute intervals, probed from 18 regions, unlimited projects, and — rare among free plans — Slack and Microsoft Teams alerts at $0, plus free cron-job healthchecks, free maintenance windows, free SSL monitoring, a free status page and even a free server-monitoring agent. Per their own feature-comparison table (September 2026), most rivals gate half of that list behind paid tiers. If your alert destination is email or a chat channel and signing up is fine, Hyperping's free plan may simply be the better tool — this page won't pretend otherwise.

The catch is how everything gets armed. Their FAQ states plainly that the API is available on paid plans only — and their MCP server and Terraform provider both authenticate with API keys, so on the free plan there is no way to create or manage a monitor from a terminal, a CI step, infrastructure-as-code, or an AI agent. Everything goes through the dashboard, after a signup. And raw webhooks — alerts POSTed to an endpoint you control — appear in their integration docs but nowhere in their pricing table, so whether the free plan includes them is not stated (verify yourself). If the moment you're in is "arm a check from this shell, right now, and alert my own endpoint," that's the narrow gap this page fills: one curl, no account, HMAC-signed webhook alerts, status page, README badge, Atom feed.

1. First, honestly: what Hyperping free includes

Facts from Hyperping's own pricing page and feature-comparison table, September 2026 (verify current numbers yourself). The free plan: 20 monitors, 5-minute checks, 18 regions, unlimited projects, 1 seat, HTTP/port/ping/keyword monitoring, email + Slack + Teams alerts, cron healthchecks, maintenance windows, SSL monitoring, weekly reports, 1 status page (Hyperping-hosted domain, embedded charts), and 1 server-monitoring agent with 2-day metric history. Not on free: the API (their FAQ: available on paid plans), DNS monitoring, OpsGenie/PagerDuty, SMS and phone alerts, browser/synthetic checks, on-call schedules and escalation policies, status-page custom domains and subscribers, SLA reporting and CSV export. Essentials ($24/month) adds 50 monitors, 30-second checks, the API, on-call & escalation, DNS monitoring, 3 browser checks, custom status-page domain, 100 subscribers and "all integrations"; Pro ($74) adds phone alerts; Business ($249) scales everything to 1,000 monitors at 20-second checks.

Said plainly: their free 5-minute interval is 6× faster than our 30-minute checks, they verify from 18 regions where we probe from Cloudflare's edge as a single logical vantage point, and their product is a real monitoring platform — status pages, on-call, incident management, server agents, browser checks. We have no equivalent for most of that. This page is about one narrow moment: a check armed from a terminal or agent, alerting a webhook, in ten seconds, with no signup form.

2. "Watch this URL" — one curl, no signup form

curl -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/status/monitor \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url":"https://api.example.com/health","notify":"https://your-endpoint.example.com/hook"}'

We GET your URL every 30 minutes from Cloudflare's network (8s timeout, redirects followed, 2xx/3xx = up). Your URL is probed immediately, so the response doubles as a one-shot "is my site up from outside?" check — and it contains everything else you need:

No webhook handy? Omit notify and you get a pollable monitor instead: the create response includes a poll URL that returns the down/recovered transitions since your last poll plus the latest check — no endpoint to host. How poll mode works.

{
  "id": "mon-XXXX",
  "secret": "…",
  "current": { "ok": true, "http_status": 200, "ms": 87 },
  "checked_every_minutes": 30,
  "status_page":  "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/status/mon-XXXX",
  "badge_svg":    "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/status/mon-XXXX/badge.svg",
  "feed_atom":    "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/status/mon-XXXX/feed.xml"
}

That's the whole thing Hyperping's free plan can't do from a shell: no dashboard visit, no account, and the same endpoint self-documents on a bare GET — which also makes it trivially scriptable in CI (curl … || exit 1) or from an agent.

3. The alert contract — signed, documented, free

notify takes a Slack incoming webhook, a Discord webhook, or any HTTPS endpoint — the format is sniffed from the host: hooks.slack.com gets {"text": …}, discord.com/api/webhooks gets {"content": …}, and anything else gets JSON signed with your monitor's secret (x-mockbird-signature: sha256=hex(hmac-sha256(secret, body)) — verify it like a Stripe webhook). A confirmation delivery hits your webhook at create time so you know the channel works before you rely on it.

For comparison: Hyperping's webhook integration docs show check.down / check.up JSON payloads, but describe no signature or signing secret — receivers have no documented way to verify the sender — and, as noted above, the pricing page doesn't say which plans include the integration at all. Ours is the default and only channel, signed, on every monitor, at $0.

Alerting is deliberately quiet: one POST when the URL goes down, one when it recovers, debounced — two consecutive checks must agree, so a single blip never pages you. No retries, best-effort delivery, and 5 consecutive failed deliveries auto-remove the monitor (a dead webhook can't rot forever). No email, no SMS, no Teams here, stated plainly — the webhook is the product.

4. Terraform, MCP, agents — the "armed by machines" axis

Hyperping's MCP server and Terraform provider are genuinely modern — 26 MCP tools, real infrastructure-as-code support — but both authenticate with an API key created in the dashboard's project settings, and the API sits on paid plans. So the machine-friendly surface effectively starts at $24/month, after a signup.

Here the machine surface is the free surface. The create/info/delete endpoints above need no auth beyond the per-monitor secret, respond with JSON, and self-document on GET. And Mockbird's monitors are also exposed as MCP tools — an agent can arm a watch, read the current state, and unsubscribe, with zero keys. If you're wiring an agent that needs to know "is this dependency up?", it can also subscribe to our public tracker of 50+ developer APIs at /status without spending a monitor slot.

5. Cron jobs — free on both sides, different shapes

Credit where due: Hyperping's healthchecks (dead-man's-switch cron monitoring) are included on their free plan — most rivals charge for exactly this. The difference is again the arming path (dashboard vs one curl) and the alert channel. Here: POST /api/status/heartbeat returns a secret ping URL; append && curl -fsS -m 10 <ping_url> to the cron job, and if pings stop arriving within period + grace you get one service.down webhook, one service.up on resume. Full recipes: cron-job monitoring with one curl.

6. Translation table

7. Honest comparison

Facts checked September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing page — verify current numbers yourself:

Where Hyperping wins, plainly: 5-minute free checks from 18 regions (6× faster than ours, multi-location where we're single-vantage), free Slack + Teams alerting that almost nobody else gives away, free cron healthchecks, port/ping/keyword monitors, a real status-page product, server monitoring, and paid tiers that add on-call, escalation, browser checks and phone alerts to one coherent platform. We do: one curl, no signup, HMAC-signed webhook down/up alerts, public status artifacts, free heartbeats, and keyless MCP tools — at $0, where their machine-accessible surface starts at $24/month.

8. Managing monitors

# info + 24h ok-rate + recent checks · then stop
curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/status/monitor/mon-XXXX?secret=YOUR_SECRET"
curl -X DELETE "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/status/monitor/mon-XXXX?secret=YOUR_SECRET"

Both endpoints self-document on a bare GET. The complete walkthrough of the monitor feature is the uptime monitor API guide.