--- title: "Uptime Kuma Cost (2026): Free Software, Not Free Monitoring | FourSight" description: "Uptime Kuma's software is genuinely free and excellent. The monitoring isn't free: a VPS ($5–20/mo), upgrades, backups, TLS, and a second monitor to watch the monitor. Here's the honest total cost of ownership vs FourSight's hosted $0–160/mo tiers." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "Is Uptime Kuma really free?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "The software is — it's MIT-licensed open source with no paid tier, and it's an excellent piece of software. The monitoring isn't free for a business: you supply the server (~$5–20/mo for a VPS), the upgrades, the backups, the TLS, and an answer for who gets alerted when the Kuma box itself dies." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "What does self-hosted monitoring actually cost a business?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "A typical honest tally: $5–20/mo for a VPS, a few hours a year of upgrades and backup maintenance at your team's hourly rate, plus a second external monitor to watch the Kuma instance. For most commercial teams that lands above FourSight Starter ($16/mo) — and still without multi-region consensus." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Can I use Uptime Kuma and FourSight together?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes, and it's a genuinely good pattern: keep Kuma for internal-only network checks and use FourSight as the external, multi-region watchdog — including monitoring the Kuma host itself. FourSight's Free plan (10 monitors) covers the watchdog role at $0." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does FourSight have a free plan comparable to running Kuma free?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "FourSight Free covers 10 monitors with 4-region quorum consensus, email alerts, and a hosted status page — no server required, commercial use allowed. Kuma offers unlimited monitors for $0 but from a single self-hosted location; which free wins depends on whether monitor count or monitor independence matters more to you." } } ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://foursight.cloud" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Compare", "item": "https://foursight.cloud/compare" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Uptime Kuma Pricing", "item": "https://foursight.cloud/compare/uptime-kuma-pricing" } ] } ] --- [FourSight ](/) [Features](/#features)[Pricing](/pricing)[Guides](/guides)[Glossary](/glossary)[FAQ](/faq) [Login](/auth)[Start free](/auth?signup=true) [Start free](/auth?signup=true) Uptime Kuma Cost Comparison # Uptime Kuma Is Free. Running it isn't. Uptime Kuma is excellent open-source software with a $0 license — that part is real, and we won't spin it. The total cost of self-hosted monitoring is the license plus a server, ops time, and the awkward question of who monitors the monitor. This page prices all of it honestly against FourSight's hosted tiers. $0 software vs $0 Free plan No VPS, no patching 4-region quorum built in [See FourSight Pricing](/pricing) [Compare Scenarios](#price-scenarios) Looking for the feature-by-feature comparison instead? See [FourSight vs Uptime Kuma](/compare/uptime-kuma-alternative). The pricing model ## How Uptime Kuma's cost actually works Uptime Kuma has no license fee, no tiers, and no vendor — you run it yourself. The direct cost is the machine it runs on: a small VPS runs $5–20/mo, or effectively $0 if you already have an always-on box with spare capacity. That makes it the cheapest option on paper for anyone whose time is free. The indirect costs are where self-hosting gets expensive for businesses: installing and upgrading the software, TLS certificates, database backups, securing the instance, and — structurally — the fact that a single self-hosted instance checks from one network location and can't monitor itself. If the box (or the cloud account it shares with your app) goes down, your monitoring goes down with it, silently. FourSight is the hosted trade: Free covers 10 monitors with 4-region quorum consensus at $0; paid tiers run $16–160/mo flat. You're paying for independent infrastructure, multi-region consensus a single Kuma box can't do, and nobody on your team owning monitor uptime as a side job. Price math, July 2026 ## The same shopping list, priced both ways Scenario FourSight Uptime Kuma Software license $0 — Free plan 10 monitors, 4-region quorum, email alerts, 1 hosted status page. Commercial use allowed. $0 — open source MIT-licensed, unlimited monitors. Genuinely free software; point to Kuma. Infrastructure to run it $0 — nothing to host Probes run on FourSight's infrastructure across US, Canada, Europe, and APAC. VPS ~$5–20/mo Plus Docker/Node upkeep, TLS, reverse proxy, and database backups — your responsibility. Multi-region checks with consensus Included on every plan Every check fans out to 4 regions; incidents open only when a quorum agrees. Multiple instances + coordination A single Kuma instance checks from one location; DIY multi-region means running and reconciling several instances yourself. Who monitors the monitor? Not your problem FourSight's own uptime is FourSight's job, on infrastructure independent of yours. A second monitor (and its hosting) If Kuma's box or cloud region fails, alerting fails silently — most self-hosters add an external watchdog, which is another tool to run or buy. Ops time (upgrades, backups, security) $0 hours Hosted — upgrades and backups are invisible to you. A few hours per year, every year Cheap for a homelab, real money at business hourly rates. Cost it honestly for your team. Uptime Kuma is free open-source software (MIT license) — VPS prices and ops-time estimates are typical figures as of July 2026, not vendor quotes. FourSight prices are from our public pricing page (annual billing ≈ 25% off). Full FourSight plan details are on the [pricing page](/pricing). Honest take ## Which pricing wins, where Pricing pages usually pretend the writer's tool is cheaper in every scenario. Here's the fair version — where Uptime Kuma's pricing is genuinely the better deal, and where FourSight's is. ### Where Uptime Kuma wins Where Uptime Kuma's $0 genuinely wins: - Homelabs and learning projects, where running the stack is the point and your time is the hobby budget. - Monitoring internal-only endpoints that a hosted probe can't reach anyway. - Compliance or data-residency postures that require monitoring to stay inside your own infrastructure. - You already run an always-on box with spare capacity, and unlimited monitors at $0 beats any hosted free tier on count. ### Where FourSight wins Where paying for hosted monitoring is cheaper in practice: - Any commercial workload where an engineer's time costs more than $16/mo — the Starter plan pays for itself in under an hour of avoided ops work. - You need multi-region quorum consensus, which a single self-hosted instance structurally cannot provide. - Your monitoring must survive the outage it's monitoring — FourSight runs on infrastructure independent of your cloud account. - You want hosted status pages, escalation policies, and incident timelines without assembling them from plugins. FAQ ## Uptime Kuma pricing questions #### Is Uptime Kuma really free? The software is — it's MIT-licensed open source with no paid tier, and it's an excellent piece of software. The monitoring isn't free for a business: you supply the server (~$5–20/mo for a VPS), the upgrades, the backups, the TLS, and an answer for who gets alerted when the Kuma box itself dies. #### What does self-hosted monitoring actually cost a business? A typical honest tally: $5–20/mo for a VPS, a few hours a year of upgrades and backup maintenance at your team's hourly rate, plus a second external monitor to watch the Kuma instance. For most commercial teams that lands above FourSight Starter ($16/mo) — and still without multi-region consensus. #### Can I use Uptime Kuma and FourSight together? Yes, and it's a genuinely good pattern: keep Kuma for internal-only network checks and use FourSight as the external, multi-region watchdog — including monitoring the Kuma host itself. FourSight's Free plan (10 monitors) covers the watchdog role at $0. #### Does FourSight have a free plan comparable to running Kuma free? FourSight Free covers 10 monitors with 4-region quorum consensus, email alerts, and a hosted status page — no server required, commercial use allowed. Kuma offers unlimited monitors for $0 but from a single self-hosted location; which free wins depends on whether monitor count or monitor independence matters more to you. Go deeper ## Related features & guides [ #### Multi-region monitoring, explained Why single-location checks generate false positives and how quorum consensus fixes it. ](/guides/multi-region-monitoring-explained)[ #### Quorum monitoring The consensus mechanism a single self-hosted instance can't replicate. ](/glossary/quorum-monitoring)[ #### Status pages Hosted, brandable status pages without running a second service. ](/features/status-pages) More price math ## Other pricing comparisons [UptimeRobot pricing](/compare/uptimerobot-pricing)[StatusCake pricing](/compare/statuscake-pricing)[Pingdom pricing](/compare/pingdom-pricing)[Better Stack pricing](/compare/better-stack-pricing)[Cronitor pricing](/compare/cronitor-pricing)[Healthchecks.io pricing](/compare/healthchecks-pricing)[Hyperping pricing](/compare/hyperping-pricing)[Pulsetic pricing](/compare/pulsetic-pricing) Or read the full [FourSight vs Uptime Kuma comparison](/compare/uptime-kuma-alternative) — features, migration steps, and when Uptime Kuma is the better choice. ## Run the numbers on your own monitors Start on the Free plan — 10 monitors, 4-region quorum consensus, commercial use allowed. No credit card. [Start monitoring free](/auth?signup=true) [View pricing](/pricing) FourSight © 2026 [TetraCore](https://tetracorehq.com/). All rights reserved. FourSight is a TetraCore product — Bowling Green, Ohio. 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