compare · alertping vs pulsetic
Pulsetic alternative with unmetered SMS: Pulsetic pricing, plans and limits compared
Short answer: Pulsetic is cheaper than AlertPing at every comparable tier, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Pulsetic runs 30-second checks from $19 a month billed monthly, has a free plan that includes a custom status-page domain, and sends voice calls from $9. AlertPing costs more and is the better pick for a narrower reason: SMS and voice are unmetered on every plan with no credit balance to run down, every failure is confirmed from three named regions before anyone gets paged, and API checks can assert on a JSON path rather than a substring. If price per monitor is your deciding factor, buy Pulsetic.
Last updated August 2026 · Pulsetic pricing verified in USD against pulsetic.com and US listings
alertping ▸ run check
live
▸ type a domain and run a real-feel check
▸ probes from 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
the honest frame
Pulsetic wins on price. Here is what you trade for it.
Most comparison pages bury the part where the competitor is cheaper. Pulsetic is cheaper, by a lot. Its Team plan is $19 a month billed monthly for 50 or more monitors at 30-second checks. Our Team plan is $59 a month for 100 monitors at the same interval. On raw price per monitor there is no argument to make, so we are not making one.
The three differences below are the honest reasons a team picks us anyway. They are about predictability and check quality, not about cost. If none of them matter to your setup, Pulsetic is the better buy and this page has done its job.
SMS with no credit meter
Pulsetic includes a bundle of SMS and voice credits per plan (roughly 30 on Solo, 100 on Team, 200 on Organization) and charges $0.10 for each message or call beyond it, from a pool shared between texts and calls. AlertPing includes SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts on every plan with nothing to top up. A bad month costs the same as a quiet one.
Three named confirming regions
Every failed check is re-run from Virginia, Frankfurt and Singapore before we page anyone. Pulsetic also re-verifies from remote nodes, which is good practice, but it does not publish how many nodes have to agree or which ones they are. If you need to write the confirmation rule into a runbook, one of those is documentable and the other is not.
JSON path assertions
Pulsetic can assert on status code, response headers, and whether a keyword is present or
absent in the body. That is solid, but it is substring matching. Our
API monitoring can assert
on a specific JSON path, so a health endpoint that returns 200 with
"database":"degraded" fails the check instead of passing it.
pulsetic pricing
Pulsetic pricing in full, in US dollars
Pulsetic publishes four tiers. Monthly list prices are below, with the annual equivalent in brackets, because Pulsetic bills annual plans at ten times the monthly rate (two months free). Pulsetic is operated by a New York company and quotes in USD, so these are not converted figures.
| Plan | Price | Monitors | Interval | Regions | SMS and call credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 | 5 minutes | 3 | None |
| Solo | $9/mo billed monthly ($7.50 billed annually) | 10+ | 60 seconds | 5 | 30+ |
| Team | $19/mo billed monthly ($15.83 billed annually) | 50+ | 30 seconds | 15 | 100+ |
| Organization | $49/mo billed monthly ($40.83 billed annually) | 300+ | 30 seconds | 15 | 200+ |
Two caveats worth knowing before you budget
The Team and Organization prices are shown on Pulsetic's own pricing page as promotional, with $39 and $69 struck through above them. Pulsetic does not publish an expiry for the promotion, so treat $19 and $49 as the current rate rather than a permanent one. Separately, Pulsetic's pricing page lists Solo at a 60-second interval while Capterra and SoftwareAdvice both list it at 5 minutes. We believe the vendor page is current and the directories are stale, but if 60-second checks on the $9 plan are the reason you are buying, confirm it in the product first.
What sits outside the plan price
- $0.10 per SMS or voice call over the included bundle.
- $8 per extra teammate per month, $2 per notify-only seat.
- $0.01 per status-page subscriber per month beyond the included allowance.
- API access, role-based access control and white labeling begin on Team.
- SSO is on Organization only.
side by side
AlertPing vs Pulsetic, feature by feature
Pulsetic's figures come from its published pricing matrix and knowledge base and can change, so confirm anything decision-critical before you sign. Ours are on the uptime monitoring pricing page.
| AlertPing | Pulsetic | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | No, free trial only | Yes: 10 monitors, 5-minute checks, 3 status pages |
| Entry paid plan | $19/mo, 20 monitors, 60-second checks | $9/mo, 10+ monitors, 60-second checks |
| Cheapest 30-second checks | $59/mo (Team) | $19/mo (Team) |
| Fastest interval available | 15 seconds on Enterprise | 30 seconds, no faster tier |
| Check locations | 3 regions (Virginia, Frankfurt, Singapore) | 15 locations, 3 to 15 usable depending on plan |
| Outage confirmation | Named 3-region re-check before alerting | Re-verified from remote nodes, count not published |
| SMS alerts | Unlimited on every plan, no credits | Bundled credits, $0.10 each after, none on free |
| Voice call alerts | Enterprise only | From $9/mo, shares the SMS credit pool |
| Check types | HTTP, API with assertions, ping, TCP port, SSL, cron | HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP port, SSL, DNS, domain expiry, cron, RUM |
| API assertions | Status code, keyword, JSON path, response-time budget | Status code, response headers, keyword present or absent |
| Scripted browser flows | No | No (screenshots only) |
| SSL certificate monitoring | Every plan | Every plan including free |
| Status pages | 1 to 20 by plan | 3 on free, unlimited on every paid plan |
| Custom status-page domain | Business ($189/mo) | Every plan including free |
| Branded status pages | 5 branded pages from Team ($59/mo) | Pulsetic branding removed from Team ($19/mo) |
| History retention | Per plan, SLA reports on Business | 3 months free, 1 year Solo and Team, 5 years Organization |
| SSO | Enterprise | Organization ($49/mo) |
Read that table honestly and Pulsetic takes most of the rows. It is cheaper, it has a free tier, it checks from more locations, it keeps history longer, it hands out a custom status-page domain on a $0 plan while we gate ours behind $189, and it does voice calls at $9 where we do them only on Enterprise. Our column wins on four things: unmetered SMS, a confirmation step we can describe precisely, JSON path assertions, and a 15-second interval that exists at all.
the credit math
When does metered SMS actually cost you more?
This is the one place our pricing can beat Pulsetic's, so it deserves real arithmetic rather than a scare story. Pulsetic Team includes 100 or more SMS and voice credits and charges $0.10 for each one after that. Our Team plan is $59 with no meter. The gap to close is $40 a month, which is 400 extra messages.
Four hundred extra messages is a lot. A team that pages five responders on twenty incidents a month sends about 100 texts and stays inside the bundle. Even at fifty incidents you are looking at roughly 250 messages, so 150 over, so $15 of overage: $34 all in, still well under our $59. On a straight cost basis Pulsetic stays cheaper for almost every team we would honestly expect to meet.
The argument for unmetered alerting is not that it saves money on average. It is that the bill does not move on your worst month, and that nobody on the team ever has a reason to trim a notification list to conserve credits. Some finance and on-call cultures care about that a great deal, and some think it is noise. Decide which one you are.
Choose AlertPing if
- You want alerting costs that never move, with SMS included rather than drawn from a credit bundle.
- You have to document the alerting rule for an auditor or a runbook, and "confirmed from Virginia, Frankfurt and Singapore" is an answer you can write down.
- Your health endpoint returns 200 with a status field inside the JSON, so you need a JSON path assertion rather than a keyword search.
- You need checks faster than 30 seconds, which means our Enterprise tier at 15 seconds.
- You want SLA monitoring software with generated SLA reports on the Business plan.
Choose Pulsetic if
- Budget is the deciding factor. It is cheaper than us at every tier that matters.
- You want a genuinely usable free plan, including a custom domain on your status page.
- Voice calls matter and you do not want to buy an enterprise contract to get them.
- You want unlimited status pages, or five years of history for post-incident work.
- You need DNS or domain-expiry checks, or real user monitoring, which we do not offer.
- Checking from 15 locations rather than three is worth more to you than a documented confirmation rule.
questions people ask
Pulsetic questions, answered straight
How much does Pulsetic cost?
Pulsetic costs $0 for the free plan, $9 a month for Solo, $19 a month for Team and $49 a month for Organization, all billed monthly in USD. Annual billing is ten times the monthly rate, so two months free. Team and Organization are currently shown as promotional prices against $39 and $69 list.
Is Pulsetic free?
Yes, Pulsetic has a free forever plan with 10 monitors at 5-minute checks, three status pages and a custom status-page domain. The limits are that it sends email alerts only: no SMS, no voice, and no Slack, Teams, Discord or Telegram integrations, which all begin on the $9 Solo plan.
What is the best Pulsetic alternative?
It depends what pushed you off Pulsetic. If it was metered SMS or the undocumented confirmation logic, AlertPing is the direct swap at $19 to $59 a month. If it was the 30-second floor, look at faster synthetic tools. If you only wanted heartbeat checks for cron jobs, a Healthchecks.io alternative will cost you far less than either of us.
Pulsetic vs UptimeRobot: which is better?
Pulsetic reaches 30-second checks at $19 a month billed monthly, and UptimeRobot now matches that interval on its Team plan at about $45 a month (about $38 billed annually) with 100 monitors. UptimeRobot's free tier allows 50 monitors against Pulsetic's 10, but it is non-commercial and excludes SSL monitoring, which Pulsetic includes free. For a paying business, Pulsetic is usually the better value of the two. Our own UptimeRobot alternative page has the full breakdown.
Does Pulsetic monitor SSL certificates?
Yes, on every plan including the free one. SSL, port, TCP and ICMP ping checks are all in the base feature set, and Pulsetic validates certificates on a daily cycle. That matters more each year now that certificate lifetimes are falling, which we cover in the 200-day certificate change.
Does Pulsetic work with Cloudflare?
Yes, and so does any HTTP monitor, but the caveats apply to all of them equally. Cloudflare can serve a cached page while your origin is failing, and its bot protection can challenge a monitoring probe and log it as a 403. Pulsetic publishes its check IP ranges so you can allowlist them. We cover the whole pattern in Cloudflare uptime monitoring.
How many locations does Pulsetic check from?
Pulsetic checks from 15 worldwide locations, but how many you can actually use is set by your plan: 3 on free, 5 on Solo, and all 15 on Team and Organization. You can enable or disable specific locations per monitor. AlertPing runs three regions and uses all of them on every plan as a confirmation quorum rather than as a coverage map.
Does Pulsetic do browser or transaction monitoring?
No. Pulsetic offers monitor screenshots on its higher plans but no scripted multi-step browser flows, and it says so itself when comparing against Checkly. AlertPing does not offer them either. If you need to script a login and a checkout, both of us are the wrong tool and you want a Playwright-based synthetic vendor.
“Our old tool paged me at 3am for blips that fixed themselves in a minute. AlertPing only pages when all three regions agree it's really down. I sleep again.”
SRE lead, payments SaaS
“I run 40 client sites. One dashboard, one status page per client, and SMS that does not cost extra credits. The math was not close.”
Founder, web agency
“We sell a 99.9% SLA. AlertPing's reports are what we attach to the quarterly review. Our biggest customer stopped asking for proof.”
CTO, logistics platform
Alerting that costs the same on your worst month
30-second checks confirmed from three regions, SMS and email included on every plan with no credit bundle, and SSL, API, port and cron checks in one flat price from $19 a month.