Oh Dear

What Oh Dear actually is

Oh Dear is a website monitoring service that deliberately refuses to be just an uptime pinger. Every monitored site gets checked for uptime, SSL certificate health, broken links and mixed content, DNS records and blocklists, domain expiration, scheduled-task (cron) failures, and performance — with Lighthouse runs, sitemap monitoring, and public status pages on top. It was started in 2018 by Freek Van der Herten (the developer behind Spatie and its open-source packages) and Mattias Geniar (a sysadmin from the Belgian hosting world), and it grew out of the open-source laravel-uptime-monitor package first released in November 2016. The company is small — publicly listed at 2–10 people, based in Belgium — and the product shows the fingerprints of people who run their own clients' sites: "we run Oh Dear on Oh Dear" is their line about false alarms, and the two-location verification behind every alert is the mechanism that backs it up.

The mental model is consolidation. Their pitch is that one site slot replaces your uptime tool, SSL checker, broken-link crawler, Lighthouse runner, DNS watcher, and cron monitor — one bill, one login, one dashboard. In our view that framing is accurate rather than salesy: the check list per site is genuinely broad (uptime every minute, SSL every 30 minutes, performance every 15, DNS every two hours, a broken-link crawl daily), and there is no feature tiering to decode. Every plan, from the smallest to the largest, includes every feature — SSO, two-factor, unlimited users, status pages, the API, all notification channels. The only variable is how many sites and servers you monitor.

That "no upsell" policy extends to the security basics that competitors like to gate: single sign-on, two-factor authentication, user roles and permissions, and read-only client access are standard everywhere. Agencies can group client sites, send branded monthly reports, put their own logo and domain on status pages, and resell monitoring under their own name — while the uptime numbers are measured by an independent third party, which is the point.

Pricing: what you really pay

Oh Dear publishes nine plans and an enterprise tier (prices from ohdear.app/pricing, October 2026, in EUR excluding VAT):

• Solo — €15/month for 2 sites & servers
• Solo Plus — €29/month for 5
• Freelance — €49/month for 10
• Studio — €99/month for 25
• Agency — €149/month for 50
• Agency Plus — €199/month for 75
• Portfolio — €249/month for 100
• Portfolio Plus — €329/month for 150
• Scale — €399/month for 200
• Enterprise — 200+ sites, custom quote

Annual billing is exactly ten times the monthly price across every plan — their "two months free" is a clean 16.7% saving with no exceptions to model. A 10-day free trial includes all features and needs no credit card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee on first payment. No setup fees, no per-seat charges, no per-notification charges.

What does that work out to per site? At the 50-site Agency tier it is €3 per site per month; at Scale (200 sites) it is €2. Per site you get a lot of checks — a plain uptime monitor is cheaper per monitor, but it does not crawl your links, watch your certificates, or validate your sitemap. If you were to assemble the same coverage from separate tools, the subscription column usually ends up longer than this one. Our honest caveat: if all you need is "is it up?", Solo at €15 for two sites is poor value next to a bare uptime checker, and Oh Dear answers this themselves in their FAQ — "cheap monitoring often fails to alert you at exactly the wrong moment". We think the pricing is fair for what is in the box, and the absence of feature gates makes forecasting trivial: growth costs you site slots and nothing else. The per-site economics across the tiers are laid out on our /category/monitoring-hosting comparison page.

Performance & infrastructure

Uptime checks run every minute from a primary location. When the primary location sees a problem, a secondary location verifies it before anything is called downtime: one location down and one up is logged as a warning (partial connectivity), and a notification only fires after two consecutive confirmed-down minutes — a threshold you can raise in settings. That design is the single most valuable thing in the product; it is what stops 3am pages for a routing blip between one probe and your server. Recovery notifications fire the moment checks pass again.

Monitoring locations: third-party review data lists 16 locations worldwide, and the API exposes per-site location settings (Paris among them), so multi-region probing is real rather than claimed. The service itself is hosted in Belgium on ISO 27001-certified infrastructure, with TLS 1.2 or higher on every connection, multi-factor and least-privilege access to production, SSH-key-only admin access, and daily-through-yearly backups kept off production and restored regularly. For European teams worried about where monitoring data lives — and monitoring data reveals a lot about your traffic patterns — EU hosting is a quiet plus.

The platform is a Laravel/PHP application with a full REST API documented at ohdear.app/docs (sites, checks, monitors, notification channels — well beyond a token CRUD surface), plus integrations for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Telegram, Pushover, ntfy, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, SMS, email, and webhooks. Status pages are included on every plan, with subscriber notifications and your own branding. Check cadence per site slot: uptime per minute, performance every 15 minutes (average response time is stored per check), SSL every 30 minutes, DNS every two hours, broken-link crawl daily. We have not benchmarked the monitoring network ourselves — see /benchmarks for the infrastructure we do test — but the verification behaviour is documented in detail in their own uptime docs, which is more transparency than most monitoring vendors offer.

Where it falls short

There is no free plan — a 10-day trial and then paid. For hobbyists, students, or a single personal site, that is the end of the conversation, and there is no low-cost single-site tier below €15. Plenty of competitors will watch one site for free or for a couple of euros.

Second, this is website and server monitoring, not observability. There are no metrics, traces, log aggregation, or APM — nothing to compete with Datadog or New Relic, and no infra dashboards. If your incident response needs host-level graphs and flame charts, Oh Dear is a complement to those tools, not a replacement. Likewise, there is no on-premise deployment option: it is a cloud service, and if policy requires monitoring to run inside your own network, this is not your product.

Third, scale and company risk. A 2–10 person company (founded 2018, Belgium) is the definition of a small vendor: the product is loved by a strong niche — Laravel, HBO Nordic, Stanford, Bitmovin, Takeaway.com, IGN are cited on their site — but there is no published SLA for the service itself, no public historical uptime record we could verify, and support is "friendly human support" from that small team rather than a 24/7 enterprise desk. If monitoring is your last line of defence and you need contractual recourse, that gap matters. We would like to see a public status page and an SLA for the monitor itself.

Finally, per-site cost at high counts climbs: 200 sites at €399/month is real money, and heavily multi-site users should model the tiers before committing — though unlimited users per plan means the seat count never bites.

Who should pick this

We would pick Oh Dear when one subscription should replace a stack of half-configured single-purpose tools. Web agencies monitoring client rosters are the clearest fit: grouping, per-client monthly reports, read-only access, white-label status pages, and no per-client fees are built for that workflow, and the independent-measurement angle is exactly what agencies need when reporting uptime to clients. Laravel/PHP teams will feel at home (the product's DNA is Spatie's open-source tooling), but nothing here is PHP-specific — any website, API, or server with a port can be monitored. Small SaaS teams who want certificate expiry, cron heartbeats, and domain expiry watched without an on-call platform engineer should shortlist it too.

We would not pick it for full-stack observability, host metrics, log management, on-premise-only environments, or a single free hobby site. And if you need a contractual SLA with financial remedies, look at the enterprise monitoring vendors first.

Key takeaways

• All-in-one site monitoring: uptime (1-minute checks), SSL, broken links, mixed content, DNS, blocklists, domain expiry, cron, performance and Lighthouse — one price covers everything.
• Every feature is on every plan — SSO, 2FA, unlimited users, status pages, API. Only the site count changes; plans run €15/month (2 sites) to €399/month (200 sites).
• Two-location verification before an alert is fired cuts false alarms; the alerting design is the product's strongest engineering claim.
• Belgian company (founded 2018, Freek Van der Herten and Mattias Geniar), data hosted in the EU (Belgium) on ISO 27001 infrastructure with TLS 1.2+.
• No free plan — 10-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee instead; annual billing saves exactly two months (16.7%).
• Small vendor with no published SLA for the service itself: great for agencies and small teams, less suited to enterprises needing contractual recourse.

Sources

• https://ohdear.app/pricing
• https://ohdearapp.com/pricing
• https://ohdear.app/about
• https://ohdear.app/docs/features/uptime-monitoring
• https://ohdear.app/docs/api/checks
• https://linkedin.com/company/oh-dear
• https://freek.dev/2343-oh-dear-20-has-been-launched
• https://techyorker.com/products/oh-dear
• https://itechguides.com/products/oh-dear
• https://uptimehub.com/oh-dear-pricing