by Albright Labs
Most outages are found by a customer. They try to log in, the page hangs, and they email support or post about it before anyone on your team knows. Pulsey exists to flip that order. It checks your websites, APIs and scheduled jobs from the outside, and it tells your team when something breaks and again when it comes back.
This post covers what Pulsey is, who it is built for, and what you get on each plan.
What Pulsey does
Pulsey is a hosted uptime and incident monitoring service. There is nothing to install and nothing to self-host. You add what you want watched, choose where alerts should go, and Pulsey runs the checks from its own infrastructure.
It watches two kinds of things.
Things Pulsey checks. You give Pulsey an address and it probes it on a schedule:
- HTTP and HTTPS URLs, such as your homepage, a login page or an API health endpoint
- TCP ports, for a database, mail server or anything else that listens on a port
- DNS records, to confirm a record exists or still matches the value you expect
Checks run every minute on paid plans and every five minutes on the free plan. For HTTP checks you can also validate the response body, so a page that returns 200 with an error message in it still counts as down. You can set a response time threshold and get a warning when an endpoint stays slow.
Things that check in with Pulsey. Cron jobs, backups, queue workers and scheduled tasks do not have a URL to probe. For those, Pulsey gives you a heartbeat: a unique URL your job requests each time it finishes. If the ping does not arrive in the window you set, Pulsey marks the heartbeat missing and alerts you. A job can also report a failure right away by requesting the same URL with /fail on the end.
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://my.pulseyapp.com/heartbeat/YOUR_HEARTBEAT_IDAlerts that reach the right person
A check is only useful if the alert lands somewhere someone will see it. Pulsey sends alerts to:
- Email and SMS to people on your team, each on their own schedule, on-call rotation or temporary override
- Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram and signed webhooks
- PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Pushover on paid plans
PagerDuty and Opsgenie incidents open when something goes down and resolve on their own when it recovers.
Pulsey re-checks a failing endpoint before it alerts anyone, so a two-second blip does not page you at 3 a.m. An alert needs two failed checks in a row, so on paid plans a real outage usually reaches you within about two minutes. Alerts fire when a monitor changes state, from up to down or down to up, not on every failed check.
On paid plans you can route each monitor to only the people and tools that care about it, and escalate an incident to backup on-call if nobody acknowledges it in time.
Incidents, status pages and the rest
When a monitor fails, Pulsey opens an incident automatically and resolves it when the monitor recovers. You can acknowledge an incident from the dashboard or from the one-click link in the alert email.
A few other pieces round it out:
- Public status pages with your logo, 90 days of daily uptime bars (as far back as your plan keeps history) and recent incidents. They refresh every 60 seconds and support dark mode. Public pages never show your URLs, IP addresses or error messages.
- Maintenance windows that silence alerts during planned work.
- Uptime badges you can paste into a README or website.
- A weekly uptime report emailed to organization admins every Monday.
- Bulk CSV import for adding many monitors at once, on paid plans.
Who Pulsey is for
Pulsey is built for teams that run their own web apps, APIs and background jobs but do not have a dedicated operations person:
- A solo founder or a small product team that needs to know when production breaks, without buying and configuring a full observability suite.
- A developer who has been running an uptime checker on a spare server and is tired of maintaining the thing that is supposed to watch everything else.
- A small engineering team that wants on-call schedules, Slack alerts and a status page without per-host pricing.
If you already run a large platform with deep metrics, tracing and log analysis, a full observability suite does things Pulsey does not try to do. Pulsey answers one question well: is it up, and did it run?
Pricing
Pricing is flat and the limits are stated up front.
| Plan | Price | Monitors | Checks | Team members |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 servers and 50 heartbeats | Every 5 minutes | 1 |
| Basic | $15/mo ($162/yr) | 200 servers and 200 heartbeats | Every minute | Up to 3 |
| Pro | $30/mo ($324/yr) | 500 servers and 500 heartbeats | Every minute | Up to 10 |
| Enterprise | Contact us | Unlimited | Every minute | Unlimited |
The free plan is free for good, with no credit card and no restriction on commercial use. It includes email alerts for one team member, one other alert destination (Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram or a webhook) and a status page. Viewing uptime percentages and status history needs a paid plan: Basic keeps 30 days of logs and Pro keeps 90.
Paid plans add SMS, on-call schedules and rotations, unlimited alert destinations including PagerDuty and Opsgenie, per-monitor routing and escalation. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time, changes take effect immediately, and billing adjusts pro rata. There are no setup fees or contracts.
Pulsey is part of Albright Software, so one account and one bill cover it alongside any other Albright Software app you use.
Get started
Setup takes about five minutes. Add one endpoint, point one cron job at a heartbeat URL, connect Slack or your inbox, and you will hear about the next outage before your customers do.
Start monitoring free. No credit card, and 50 monitors on the free plan.