HTTP, ping, and keyword checks from German infrastructure. Intervals as fast as 30 seconds, every failure classified, every alert dispatched within seconds — no US cloud, no CLOUD Act, no DNS caching.
Free tier included · No credit card · Cancel anytime
Point a monitor at your service. Configure how often and how strict. Get alerted when things break.
Pick a check type — HTTP, Ping, or Keyword — and enter the URL or host you want to watch. That is the minimum configuration required. Everything else has sensible defaults.
Three ways to verify a service is alive — pick the one that matches what you are monitoring:
// every 30s from Nuremberg
GET https://api.example.com/health
→ 200 OK · 34ms · TLS 1.3
// verifies status code, response time, headers,
// SSL validity, DNS resolution, chain of trust.Once the configured number of consecutive failures is hit, an incident is opened and alerts go out via email, Slack, Discord, or webhook. The incident auto-resolves the moment the next successful check arrives — and a resolution notification is sent.
Every incident is classified with its root cause so you can triage without guessing. No generic "site down" — the alert tells you what broke.
4xx and 5xx response codes. Configurable — you decide whether a 401 is an incident or expected (e.g. for auth-gated health endpoints).
Expiry, chain-of-trust issues, hostname mismatches. Classified as its own cause so you react before an outage hits your customers.
No record found, NXDOMAIN, timeout at the resolver. No DNS caching on our side — every check performs a fresh lookup.
Server unreachable, connection hang, or response slower than your configured timeout (default 10s). Captures degraded performance, not just hard outages.
Port closed, service not listening, firewall drop. Distinct from a timeout — means the host is up but the service is dead.
Response returned 200 but the expected text is absent. Catches soft failures where a page renders an error or a WAF blocks content.
Two approaches, one goal: knowing when something breaks. Uptime catches public outages. Heartbeat catches silent internal failures.
| Uptime monitoring | Heartbeat monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | FoundersDeck pings your service | Your task pings FoundersDeck |
| Answers | "Is my service responding?" | "Did my job run on time?" |
| Best for | Websites, APIs, endpoints | Cron jobs, scripts, workers |
| Failure mode | Detects public outages | Detects silent failures |
Your API can return 200 OK while the nightly backup has silently failed for a week. Your cron job can run perfectly while your website is down. Real reliability means monitoring both directions. FoundersDeck gives you uptime monitoring and heartbeat monitoring in one tool — all hosted in Nuremberg, Germany. No CLOUD Act, no data leaving the EU, no second vendor.
The three most popular uptime tools are all US-based legal entities — meaning every byte of your monitoring data is subject to the CLOUD Act, regardless of which "region" you pick in their dashboard. Here is an honest side-by-side.
| FoundersDeck | UptimeRobot | Better Stack | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Germany | USA | USA (Delaware) | USA (SolarWinds) |
| CLOUD Act exposure | None | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data residency | Nuremberg only | Global (US-operated) | Global (US-operated) | Global (US-operated) |
| Fastest interval | 30s (Scale) | 60s (free) | 30s | 60s |
| Monitoring locations | EU only (by design) | Global | Global | Global |
| Heartbeat / cron | ● | — | ● | — |
| Public status pages | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Paid entry tier | €9 / month | $7 / month | $29 / month | $15 / month |
You genuinely need global monitoring locations (e.g. you serve a worldwide audience and want to catch regional outages), you already operate in US compliance frameworks, or you need features that are truly category-defining like Pingdom's real-user monitoring.
Your audience is European, your buyers care about GDPR and CLOUD-Act exposure, you want uptime + heartbeat + status pages in one subscription, or you prefer a tool built by a founder who uses it to monitor his own business — not a venture-backed platform.
Every knob you need to match the monitor to the service — without drowning yourself in configuration options you don't.
30-second checks on Scale, 1-minute on Starter and Pro, 5-minute on Free.
Hard cutoff after which the check is marked as timed out. Default 10 seconds.
Number of consecutive failed checks before an incident is opened.
HEAD by default to minimize load on the monitored service — switch to GET when body inspection or keyword checks are needed.
Default is 200 — override per monitor for endpoints that return 201, 204, or custom codes.
30 days on Free, 90 on Starter, 180 on Pro, 365 on Scale — all stored in Germany.
Create a free account, paste a URL, and get your first alert. Five monitors, unlimited checks, no credit card.