Checkly costs $0 on Hobby, $24 a month on Starter and $64 a month on Team, all billed annually, with Enterprise quoted. Those figures buy less monitoring than they look like they buy. Checkly bills per check run, and the Starter plan's 25,000 included API check runs are only 57% of what a single endpoint checked every minute consumes in a month. Even the $64 Team plan's 100,000 runs cover 2.28 endpoints at a one-minute interval, or 1.14 at 30 seconds. The published plan price is also only part of the rate card: the pricing page prints four separate modules, and status pages and AI root cause analysis each carry their own monthly fee on top.
Every rate below was read from checklyhq.com/pricing. The arithmetic is ours and every step is shown, so you can substitute your own check count and interval.
The four Checkly plans in 2026
Checkly is unusual in this market because it does not really sell monitors, it sells executions. Uptime monitors are counted, but browser and API checks are consumed. That distinction is the whole story of a Checkly invoice.
| Plan | Price | Uptime monitors | API check runs | Browser check runs | Users | Locations | Raw retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $0 | 10 | 10,000 / mo | 1,000 / mo | 1 | 6 public, max 3 per check | 7 days |
| Starter | $24 / mo, billed annually | 50 | 25,000 / mo | 3,000 / mo | 3 | 6 public, max 3 per check | 7 days |
| Team | $64 / mo, billed annually | 75 | 100,000 / mo | 12,000 / mo | 10 | All 22, plus private locations | 30 days |
| Enterprise | Quoted | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | All 22, parallel scheduling | 180 days |
Checkly displays these prices with a monthly and annual toggle and advertises "save up to 20%" on annual. The static pricing page shows the annual figures, so treat $24 and $64 as the annual-commitment rates and confirm the monthly-billed numbers in the signup flow before you budget. Do not take a monthly figure from a third-party aggregator; several of them disagree with each other on this product.
Maximum check frequency is 30 seconds on Team and 1 second on Enterprise. Additional uptime monitors are sold in blocks of 25 for $8 on both paid plans, which works out at $0.32 per monitor per month and is the cheapest thing on the whole rate card.
The $24 headline is one of four separately priced modules
This is the part most Checkly pricing writeups miss, and it is printed openly on the page. The plan-details table is split into four modules, and each module carries its own price row for every tier.
| Module | What it covers | Hobby | Starter | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Detect | Uptime monitors and synthetic monitoring | $0 | $24 | $64 |
| Platform | Users, retention, security, developer tooling | $0 | $24 | $64 |
| Communicate | Status pages and dashboards | $0 | $9 | $30 |
| Resolve | AI root cause analysis | $0 | $12 | $39 |
Detect and Platform both print the headline plan price, which reads as the base subscription shown twice. Communicate and Resolve print their own, lower prices, which reads as two add-ons. On that reading, a Starter account with status pages and AI root cause analysis is $45 a month rather than $24, an 87.5% uplift, and a fully loaded Team account is $133 a month rather than $64, up 107.8%. Over a year that is $540 against a $288 headline on Starter, and $1,596 against $768 on Team.
Checkly does not state on the pricing page whether Communicate and Resolve are additive or already bundled, so confirm it at checkout rather than assuming either way. What is not in doubt is that the page prices them separately, which means a status page is a line item here and not an included feature. Several competing tools, ours included, put a branded status page in every plan at no extra charge, so it is worth pricing that difference explicitly if a public status page is part of what you are buying.
What is a check run in Checkly, and how far do the included ones go
A check run is one execution of one check. Every time a monitor fires, it consumes one run from your monthly allowance. That makes the allowance easy to convert into a monitoring schedule, and the result is the single most useful number in this article.
A 30.44-day month contains 43,833 minutes, so one check running every minute for a month is 43,833 runs. Set the published allowances against that:
| Plan | API check runs | Endpoints at 1-minute | Endpoints at 5-minute | Browser runs | Journeys at 1-minute |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | 10,000 | 0.23 | 1.14 | 1,000 | 0.02 |
| Starter | 25,000 | 0.57 | 2.85 | 3,000 | 0.07 |
| Team | 100,000 | 2.28 | 11.41 | 12,000 | 0.27 |
Read the Starter row again. The included API allowance does not cover a single endpoint checked every minute for a full month. At 30 seconds, the interval most teams want for anything customer-facing, Starter covers 0.29 of one endpoint and Team covers 1.14. This is not a criticism of the product, which is aimed at scripted checks on a handful of critical flows rather than broad availability coverage. It is a warning about what the plan price means. If your mental model is "monitors", the allowance will run out in the first week.
Uptime monitors are a separate count and do not draw on the run allowances, so the 50 and 75 uptime monitors are genuinely 50 and 75 monitors. The gap opens up the moment you want an API check with assertions rather than a plain reachability check.
What are Checkly's overage charges
Checkly sells two prices for the same execution. You can buy capacity in advance, or you can let the account run past its allowance and be billed automatically. The second is substantially more expensive.
| Run type | Prepaid rate | Automatic overage | Penalty | Cost per single run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browser / Playwright, Starter | $4.00 per 1k | $6.50 per 1k | +62.5% | $0.0040 vs $0.0065 |
| Browser / Playwright, Team | $4.00 per 1k | $6.25 per 1k | +56.3% | $0.0040 vs $0.00625 |
| API check, Starter | $1.80 per 10k | $2.60 per 10k | +44.4% | $0.00018 vs $0.00026 |
| API check, Team | $1.80 per 10k | $2.50 per 10k | +38.9% | $0.00018 vs $0.00025 |
Forecasting badly costs between 39% and 63% depending on which run type you got wrong. The prepaid rate is identical on Starter and Team, which is worth knowing: there is no volume discount on additional runs, so upgrading tiers does not make extra capacity cheaper. It only makes the automatic overage marginally less punitive, and gets you all 22 locations, private locations and 30-day retention.
How much does one Checkly monitor cost per month
Once the allowance is gone, the meter is the price. Here is what one check costs for a full month at common intervals, at the prepaid rate and at the Starter overage rate.
| Check | Interval | Runs per month | Prepaid | Starter overage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| API check | Every 1 minute | 43,833 | $7.89 | $11.40 |
| API check | Every 30 seconds | 87,666 | $15.78 | $22.79 |
| API check | Every 5 minutes | 8,767 | $1.58 | $2.28 |
| Browser check | Every 1 minute | 43,833 | $175.33 | $284.91 |
| Browser check | Every 5 minutes | 8,767 | $35.07 | $56.99 |
| Browser check | Every 15 minutes | 2,922 | $11.69 | $18.99 |
One browser check at a one-minute interval is $175.33 a month at the prepaid rate, which is 7.3 times the entire Starter plan fee, and $2,104 a year. At the automatic overage rate it is $284.91 a month, or $3,419 a year. For one journey. That single row explains why almost nobody runs a checkout script every minute, and why the sensible pattern is a cheap high-frequency check for detection plus a slow browser check for correctness. If what you actually want out of a headless browser is the content of the page rather than a pass or fail verdict, that is a different job entirely and a purpose-built web scraping API will do it for a fraction of a browser-check rate.
Playwright Check Suites are billed in 30-second blocks
Checkly's headline feature for Playwright teams has its own billing rule that is easy to miss. A Playwright Check Suite is billed as one browser check per 30 seconds of runtime. Checkly's own example is that a 45-second suite consumes two runs.
That rounding matters more than it sounds. A three-minute suite is six runs every time it fires. Run it every 15 minutes and that is 2,922 executions a month, 17,533 browser runs, and $70.13 at the prepaid rate. The same suite trimmed to 90 seconds would be three runs and half the bill. On this pricing model, test suite duration is a line item, so parallelizing or splitting a long suite has a direct and immediate financial payback rather than just a developer-experience one.
Three worked Checkly bills
Prepaid rates, annual-billed plans, single location, ignoring the module question so these are floors rather than ceilings.
| Scenario | Usage | Plan | Overage | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small SaaS, 5 API endpoints every 5 minutes, 1 checkout script every 15 minutes | 43,835 API runs, 2,922 browser runs | Starter $24 | 18,835 API runs ($3.39) + none | $27.39 |
| Growing team, 20 API endpoints every minute, 4 journeys every 10 minutes | 876,660 API runs, 17,533 browser runs | Team $64 | 776,660 API ($139.80) + 5,533 browser ($22.13) | $225.93 |
| Ecommerce, 3 journeys every minute, 10 API endpoints every 30 seconds | 876,660 API runs, 131,499 browser runs | Team $64 | 776,660 API ($139.80) + 119,499 browser ($478.00) | $681.80 |
The shape is consistent. API volume is cheap enough to be a rounding error until you get to the hundreds of thousands, and browser volume is the entire bill the moment you want real journeys at a real interval. Anyone modelling Checkly should budget the browser runs first and treat the plan fee as noise.
Does Checkly have a free plan
Yes. Hobby is $0 and includes 10 uptime monitors, 10,000 API check runs, 1,000 browser check runs, one user, six public locations and 7-day raw retention. It is a genuine free tier rather than a trial, and for a personal project it is generous. What it will not do is support a team, because it is capped at a single user and has no route to buy additional runs, so exceeding the allowance means upgrading rather than topping up.
Checkly also publishes two discounts that are unusual enough to be worth naming: 30% off all plans for startups under two years old, and 50% off for nonprofits. On a fully loaded Team stack that is $93.10 and $66.50 a month respectively. Both require an application.
Is Checkly worth it
For a team that already writes Playwright tests and wants them running in production as monitors, defined in code, versioned in git and deployed from CI, Checkly is the clearest product in the category and the pricing is fair for what it does. Monitoring as code is a real differentiator and nothing on a flat plan replaces it.
It is the wrong tool if what you need is broad availability coverage. Watching 60 endpoints at 30 seconds is a rounding error on a flat plan and a five-figure annual conversation on a per-run meter. It is also worth checking whether your requirement is really a scripted journey or an HTTP check with assertions, because the price gap between those two is more than twentyfold and teams routinely buy the expensive one out of caution. Our side-by-side Checkly alternative comparison works that trade through plan by plan, our comparison of synthetic monitoring tools sets Checkly's per-run rates against Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Dynatrace, New Relic and Splunk, and the same split shows up in the API monitoring tools roundup when you judge the same vendors on assertions and interval instead of price.
Checkly is not alone in this billing model, and the failure mode repeats across the category. Grafana Cloud multiplies executions by probe location, which produces the same surprise from a different direction, as the Grafana Cloud rate card shows in detail.
The short version
Checkly's list prices are honest and its free tier is real. The forecasting risk sits in the unit, not the tier. Executions, not monitors, are what you buy; the Starter allowance does not cover one endpoint at a one-minute interval; running past the allowance costs 39% to 63% more than buying it in advance; status pages and AI root cause analysis are priced as their own modules; and a browser journey at one-minute frequency is $175 a month before anything else. Model your browser run volume first, decide honestly whether each check needs a real browser, and price the plain availability detection job separately, because that is the line where a per-run meter costs the most and adds the least.