Oh Dear vs Pingdom Pricing: Cost Per Site at 10 to 200 Sites

Pingdom is cheaper than Oh Dear at every size Oh Dear publishes, if you count one uptime check per site. Ten sites cost $18 a month on Pingdom and $55 on Oh Dear; 100 sites cost $149 against $275. The gap narrows as you grow, from about 3 times at 10 sites to 1.5 times at 200. What Oh Dear charges the extra for is a bundle Pingdom does not sell per site: a daily broken link crawl, Lighthouse, sitemap and DNS checks, and client reports.

That runs against the usual story, in which Pingdom is the expensive incumbent and the independent tools undercut it. On raw uptime checks, it is the other way round. Every price below comes from the two vendors' own pricing pages in US dollars, and every ratio is arithmetic you can redo.

How much does Oh Dear cost?

Oh Dear costs $17 a month for 2 sites up to $439 a month for 200 sites, across nine plans. Every plan carries every feature, including unlimited users, single sign-on and status pages, so the only thing you choose is the number of sites and servers. Annual billing is exactly ten times the monthly price, a 16.7% saving. The full ladder, the cost per site and a calculator are on our Oh Dear pricing breakdown.

One thing to watch: Oh Dear is a Belgian company, and visitors outside the US see its prices in euros. The US dollar list on the same page runs 10% to 13% higher, so 49 euros for 10 sites is $55, not $49.

How much does Pingdom cost?

Pingdom Synthetic Monitoring starts at $18 a month, or $198 a year, for 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check and 50 SMS alerts. It has no named plans, only a 22 step quantity ladder that runs to 30,000 checks. Users are unlimited on every tier. Real user monitoring is a separate subscription. The complete rate card is on our Pingdom pricing page.

Oh Dear vs Pingdom at 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200 sites

Four of Oh Dear's plan sizes line up exactly with Pingdom tiers (10, 25, 50 and 100), and so does its largest published plan at 200. That makes a like-for-like table easy, as long as you are clear about the unit: one Pingdom uptime check against one Oh Dear site.

The multiple falls at every step, and it falls faster on annual billing because Oh Dear's discount is twice Pingdom's: 16.7% against roughly 8% to 9%. On annual terms the gap at 200 sites is 1.38x. Pingdom's list continues past 200 checks and Oh Dear's does not (above 200 sites it quotes Enterprise pricing), so there is no published point where the two lines cross.

Is Oh Dear cheaper than Pingdom?

No, not on the published lists, at any size from 10 to 200 sites. Oh Dear is only the cheaper choice once you count what you would otherwise buy separately. If your alternative to Oh Dear is Pingdom plus a link crawler plus a Lighthouse service plus a reporting tool, the Oh Dear bundle can come out ahead. If your alternative is Pingdom on its own, it does not.

What you get per site on Oh Dear that a Pingdom check does not include

An Oh Dear site is a small bundle of checks on different clocks. According to Oh Dear's own documentation, uptime runs every minute, the SSL certificate every 30 minutes, performance every 15, DNS every two hours, and a crawl for broken links and mixed content once a day. Lighthouse, sitemap validation, domain expiry and DNS blocklist checks sit on top, along with branded monthly reports you can send to a client.

A Pingdom uptime check is a single probe of one URL, run every minute from its probe network. Pingdom's extras point in a different direction: advanced checks that script a transaction such as a login or checkout, bundled SMS alerts, and a probe network of over 100 locations. Those are real strengths, and none of them is on Oh Dear's list.

So the two tools are built for different buyers. Oh Dear fits a web agency looking after the health of a portfolio of client sites. Pingdom fits an operations team that cares about availability and scripted user journeys on a smaller number of critical endpoints.

A note on what the site health checks do and do not do: a Lighthouse score and a broken link report tell you what is wrong with a page. They do not fix it. Agencies selling SEO retainers usually pair the reports with software that fixes the SEO issues it finds rather than just grading them, and that is a separate budget line from monitoring either way.

Where each vendor's comparison gets the other one wrong

Oh Dear publishes its own comparison against Pingdom. It lists Pingdom from $15 a month and describes Pingdom's users as metered. Pingdom's pricing page today says $18 a month ($16.50 on annual billing) and unlimited users on every tier. Summaries of Oh Dear have the reverse problem: search results still quote $17 for 10 sites, $34 for 25 and $59 for 100, which is a retired list. On the current list $17 buys 2 sites and 100 sites is $275.

Both errors push in the direction you would expect from a comparison, and both are large enough to change a decision. Price the two vendors from their own current pages, not from each other's pages or from a summary.

SMS alerts: bundled on one, bring your own on the other

Pingdom includes SMS alerts in each tier, 50 a month at the entry level and more as you go up. Oh Dear supports SMS as a notification channel on every plan, but its documentation asks for your own Vonage API key and secret, so the messages are billed by Vonage. For a team that pages on SMS, that is a small extra cost on Oh Dear and a cap to watch on Pingdom. Email, Slack and webhooks cost nothing extra on either.

The Oh Dear plan jump to budget for

Pingdom has 22 tiers and Oh Dear has 9 between 2 and 200 sites, so Oh Dear's steps are bigger. The one that catches agencies is the 11th site: it moves you from the $55 Freelance plan to the $109 Studio plan, a 98% increase for one site. The 26th site adds $56 and the 51st adds $54. Pingdom's steps at the same points are $22 (10 to 25 checks) and $38 (25 to 50). If your client list sits just above one of Oh Dear's plan sizes, the real cost per site can be double the headline rate.

Which is cheaper for an agency?

For an agency that sells clients a monthly site health report, Oh Dear is usually the better value despite the higher list price, because the report, the crawl and the Lighthouse history are the product the agency resells. For an agency that just needs to know when a client site goes down, and wants a status page to show the client, both are more than the job needs. We cover that setup, with client status pages and shared alerting, on our page about uptime monitoring for agencies.

When neither is the right buy

If what you need is availability (site up, API returning the right body, certificate valid, nightly job ran) plus a status page, you are paying Oh Dear for a crawler and Pingdom for transaction scripting you will not use. A per-monitor plan charges for the checks alone. On UptimeHub pricing, 25 sites fit on Pro at $39 a month with checks every 30 seconds from six regions, against $109 on Oh Dear and $40 on Pingdom, and status pages come with the plan. We do not crawl for broken links, run Lighthouse or script transactions, so if those are on your list, one of the two tools above is the fairer comparison.

Pingdom also has a near-twin on price structure: Uptime.com sells the same 22 check counts at about half Pingdom's price, which we priced tier by tier in Uptime.com vs Pingdom pricing.

How we priced this

Oh Dear figures come from the US dollar price list embedded in ohdear.app/pricing, cross-checked against the euro cards the page renders. Pingdom figures come from the option data on pingdom.com/pricing, which we re-read for our Uptime.com comparison and which was unchanged. Check frequencies and the Vonage requirement come from Oh Dear's documentation. We have not assumed anything about sales tax, Enterprise quotes, or how Oh Dear counts scheduled tasks against its site allowance.