Does UptimeRobot monitor domain name expiry?

Yes, but not on the free plan. Their pricing page of 12 September 2026 puts SSL and domain expiry monitoring in the paid plans, from Solo up, and advertises reminders at 30, 14 and 7 days before the date. Here the same watch is in the free plan, with reminders at 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day — sixty days being the notice that leaves time to work out who holds the domain and which card pays for it.

Can you run both at once?

Yes, and nothing gets in the way technically. Both tools query the site over HTTP, which adds a few requests an hour — nothing a normal host will notice. The one thing to watch is duplicate alerts on the day of an outage: if both write to you, adjust the thresholds on one side so the same news doesn't arrive twice, two minutes apart.

What does UptimeRobot cost for fifty domains?

Their pricing page has a Solo tier at fifty monitors whose price only shows once you change the selector, and it is served by region: we read it at €22 a month from France, never in dollars. Their Team plan is listed at $46 a month for a hundred monitors. At fifty domains, our Agency plan is $49 a month and covers 150.

Comparison

DomainVigil or UptimeRobot?

UptimeRobot answers one question: is this site up? DomainVigil asks seven, that one included. Different jobs, and for an agency, different risks: a site can answer perfectly well for the three weeks its domain name spends sliding towards expiry.

Everything on this page about UptimeRobot comes from their public pricing page, checked on 12 September 2026. One detail matters: their prices are served by region. The same page shows dollars from the United States and euros from France, and the two figures do not convert into one another. The amounts quoted here are the dollar ones, on monthly billing. Anything their pricing page does not mention is written “not advertised”, never “they don't do it”.

A “monitor” and a “domain” don't count the same thing

At UptimeRobot, the billed unit is the monitor: one checkpoint, one address, one port, one keyword looked for inside a page. Their Solo plan includes ten, their Team plan a hundred. Here, the unit is the domain, and every domain carries seven watches: uptime, the certificate, DNS, the expiry date, blacklist reputation, security headers and scheduled jobs.

The consequence is arithmetic, and it decides the bill before quality ever comes up. To follow a site and its certificate on their side, you need to know whether that uses one monitor or two: their pricing page doesn't say, and we're not going to invent it here. On ours the question never arises — 30 domains cost the price of 30 domains, however many things you watch on each.

The other consequence lands squarely on our ground. Certificate, DNS and domain expiry monitoring are not in their free plan: their page says so plainly, SSL monitoring is reserved for paid plans, and their Solo plan is presented as “all monitor types plus SSL and DNS”. So a freelancer who only wants a warning before a domain expires has to pay for it there. Here it comes with the free plan.

What you need on each side

The table reads in an unusual direction. On the left, what you want to watch. Then, on each side, the plan you need to get it — the only comparison that decides anything.

What it takes, at DomainVigil and at UptimeRobot, to watch each thing — checked on 12 September 2026
What you want to watch	DomainVigil	UptimeRobot
The site is responding	Free plan, one check every 30 minutes. Every 5 minutes on Pro, every minute on Agency.	Free plan, one check every 5 minutes. 60 seconds on Solo, 30 on Team, 15 on Scale.
The certificate is about to expire	Free plan, twice a day. Hourly on Agency.	Solo plan minimum, $13 a month. Their pricing page lists SSL monitoring as paid plans only.
The domain name is about to expire	Free plan, once a day, with reminders at 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day.	Solo plan minimum. Their pricing page advertises reminders at 30, 14 and 7 days.
A DNS record has changed	Free plan, twice a day. Hourly on Pro, every fifteen minutes on Agency.	Solo plan minimum.
The domain is on a blacklist	Free plan, seven zones queried.	Not advertised on their pricing page.
The site's security headers	Free plan.	Not advertised on their pricing page.
A scheduled job didn't run	Free plan, five-minute window.	Solo plan minimum, under the name heartbeat.
Domains sorted by client	Free plan. One folder per client, with its own status page.	Not advertised. Their unit is the monitor, not the client.
The bill at around thirty sites	$15 a month for 30 domains, all seven watches included.	Team plan, $46 a month for 100 monitors.
How much history is kept	30 days on free, 90 on Pro, 365 on Agency.	3 months on free, 12 months on Solo, 24 months on Team.

UptimeRobot prices as served in dollars on 12 September 2026, monthly billing. Their Solo plan also has a fifty-monitor tier whose price only appears once you change the selector: from France it shows as €22 a month, and we have never seen it in dollars. So it isn't quoted in a dollar column.

What UptimeRobot does better

On their own ground they are ahead, and not by a little. These five points come off their pricing page; they aren't conceded out of politeness.

Frequency. 60 seconds from the Solo plan up, 30 seconds on Team, 15 on Scale. Our fastest check is one minute, and only on the Agency plan. For an online shop or a payment endpoint, that gap is measured in lost orders.
The free plan. Fifty monitors, against 5 domains here. If all you need to know is that a site is answering, their free plan goes ten times further than ours.
Status pages. A hundred white-label pages from Team up, unlimited on Scale, with passwords, email subscribers, translations and search-engine opt-out. We open a public page on the free plan, but nothing like that depth of settings.
Channels. Webhook, Zapier and PagerDuty from Team up, plus SMS and voice calls on credits bought separately. We send neither: an outage at three in the morning won't wake you here.
The mobile app, iOS and Android, advertised on every plan. We don't have one.

What DomainVigil does better

Our advantages aren't about speed. They're about how much ground is covered, and about what happens once the alert has gone out.

The scope, from the free plan on. Seven watches, no tier to clear. On their side, three of those seven need a paid plan and two aren't advertised at all.
The unit being counted. A domain stays one domain however many things you watch on it. Nobody has to wonder whether adding the certificate will cost another monitor.
The copilot. Every alert comes with a likely cause, a three-step fix and the name of whoever has to act. Their pricing page advertises incident root cause from the Team plan up; a written fix isn't something they advertise.
The portfolio, client by client. Every domain sits in its client's folder, with a status page you can show that client. The tool is built for an agency looking after other people's domains, not for a team watching its own infrastructure.
The price of a domain watched in full: $15 for 30 domains, $49 for 150, then 100 more for $10.

How to choose, honestly

Choose UptimeRobot if seconds count. A shop, a payment endpoint, a service whose downtime has a price tag: their shortest interval is fifteen times tighter than ours, they can ring your phone, and their mobile app goes with you.

Choose DomainVigil if what woke you up last time wasn't an outage. A domain that expired because the client's card had expired first, a certificate that lapsed on a Saturday morning, a DNS record changed by a contractor who told nobody: that is the ground we cover, and none of those three is in their free plan.

And run both if you can. Out of seven watches, only one overlaps. UptimeRobot on the three sites that must never go down and DomainVigil across the whole portfolio is a sensible split — that isn't an admission, it's what the agencies who write to us already do.

Try DomainVigil for free

5 domains free, forever. No card required.

Questions people ask us

Does UptimeRobot monitor domain name expiry?: Yes, but not on the free plan. Their pricing page of 12 September 2026 puts SSL and domain expiry monitoring in the paid plans, from Solo up, and advertises reminders at 30, 14 and 7 days before the date. Here the same watch is in the free plan, with reminders at 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day — sixty days being the notice that leaves time to work out who holds the domain and which card pays for it.
Can you run both at once?: Yes, and nothing gets in the way technically. Both tools query the site over HTTP, which adds a few requests an hour — nothing a normal host will notice. The one thing to watch is duplicate alerts on the day of an outage: if both write to you, adjust the thresholds on one side so the same news doesn't arrive twice, two minutes apart.
What does UptimeRobot cost for fifty domains?: Their pricing page has a Solo tier at fifty monitors whose price only shows once you change the selector, and it is served by region: we read it at €22 a month from France, never in dollars. Their Team plan is listed at $46 a month for a hundred monitors. At fifty domains, our Agency plan is $49 a month and covers 150.