Affordable SSL monitoring • Free tier • Unlimited domains
Affordable SSL Monitoring for Small IT Teams
A free-tier SSL certificate monitor sized for small IT teams. Unlimited domains, no per-monitor pricing, no seat fees, no enterprise rollout. The certificate expiry coverage of a Datadog or SolarWinds, without the line item.
Free tier covers unlimited domains • No sales call • Add a cert in 30 seconds
The pricing problem with enterprise SSL monitors
When a small IT team goes looking for SSL certificate monitoring, the first results are almost always platforms priced for organisations much larger than yours. Datadog charges per host and per monitor. Pingdom charges per advanced check. SolarWinds and PRTG charge per sensor and often require a yearly licence. UptimeRobot's SSL features sit behind a paid tier.
None of those tools are wrong. They are simply priced for an estate where SSL is one of fifty signals, not the whole job. If you run twenty to two hundred hostnames and just need to know before a certificate expires, paying for the surrounding platform to get that one signal is bad value.
Certimon is built for that case. The free tier covers unlimited domains, alerts route to Telegram, Microsoft Teams or PagerDuty, and there is no plan upgrade waiting at the 50-domain or 100-domain mark.
Why small IT teams pick Certimon on cost
Five concrete reasons the cost line stays at zero.
Unlimited domains, free
Add 5, 50 or 500 hostnames on the same free account. There is no per-monitor charge and no domain cap on the free tier.
No per-seat pricing
Alerts fire to a Telegram group or Microsoft Teams channel. The whole on-call rotation can see them. No user licences to budget for.
No credit card to start
No card, no trial countdown, no sales call. Open the Telegram bot or sign in with an email magic-link and add a domain.
30-second setup
No agent install, no SSO project, no platform onboarding. The setup cost — usually the hidden expense in enterprise tools — is essentially zero.
Independent of your stack
Hosted off-site. If your monitoring or DNS is having a bad day, the SSL alert still fires from somewhere else.
Works with what you already pay for
Routes to Telegram, Microsoft Teams Workflows, or PagerDuty Events API v2. No need to migrate alerting away from tools your team already uses.
Certimon vs enterprise SSL monitoring on cost
Indicative public pricing for a small IT team running roughly 50 hostnames who just needs SSL expiry alerts. Vendor pricing changes — always confirm before purchase.
| Tool | Typical small-team cost for SSL monitoring | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Certimon | $0 | Free tier, unlimited domains, no seat charge. |
| Datadog | Paid plan typically required | SSL checks live inside Synthetic monitoring, which is priced per test. |
| Pingdom | Paid plan typically required | Advanced checks (incl. SSL) are bundled with paid uptime tiers. |
| SolarWinds / PRTG | Per-sensor or yearly licence | Built for NMS workloads; SSL is one of many sensor types. |
| UptimeRobot SSL | Paid plan typically required | SSL monitoring sits behind the paid tiers, not the free one. |
| DIY (cron + openssl) | $0 cash, engineer time | Free until the cron host dies or the engineer who wrote it leaves. |
These are headline summaries — exact pricing depends on host counts, regions and add-ons. The point is structural: enterprise tools price SSL as part of a larger platform, so a small SSL workload is rarely cheap on them.
What you actually need at this size
A small IT team monitoring 20 to 200 hostnames is solving a specific problem: do not let a certificate expire silently. Everything else is overhead.
- • External hourly probe on every registered hostname.
- • Configurable reminder windows (commonly 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry).
- • Alerts to a channel the team already watches — Telegram group, Teams channel, PagerDuty rotation.
- • No vendor account that can be lost when a person leaves.
- • No per-domain pricing, so adding a new client domain is not a procurement decision.
Certimon ships exactly that surface and nothing else. If you also need uptime checks, APM or log aggregation, keep using whatever you already have — Certimon is designed to slot alongside it as the SSL-specific layer at zero cost.
Get the team monitored in five minutes
One engineer drives it during stand-up. Free, no card.
- 1. Open app.certimon.com and sign in with Telegram or an email magic-link.
- 2. Paste in every hostname the team is responsible for — marketing site, app, api, docs, status, client sites.
- 3. Set reminder windows (a 30 and 7-day pair is a sensible default).
- 4. Route alerts to a Telegram group, a Microsoft Teams channel, or a PagerDuty service so the whole rotation sees them.
- 5. Add one line to the runbook: "SSL expiry alerts fire into <channel>. Reply with whoever is renewing."
FAQ
Is the free tier really free, or is there a domain cap?
Free for unlimited domains. There is no domain cap to upsell you off.
Are alerts limited on the free tier?
No. You can configure multiple reminder windows per domain and route to Telegram, Microsoft Teams Workflows or PagerDuty without a paid plan.
Why is this cheaper than Datadog or Pingdom for SSL?
Certimon only does SSL expiry monitoring. The platforms you are comparing to are full observability or uptime suites — their pricing reflects the surrounding stack, not the SSL check.
Can a small managed-services or consultancy team use this for client domains?
Yes. There is no per-client surcharge. Many consultancies register their client hostnames under a single Certimon account and route alerts into a shared team channel.
What if we eventually need uptime, APM or log aggregation as well?
Pair Certimon with whatever uptime tool you already use. It is designed to be the SSL-specific layer and to stay out of the way of the rest of your stack.
Is there a paid tier, and what does it add?
The core SSL monitoring tier is free. If a paid option is added in future for organisations that want SLAs or volume features, the free tier described here will remain a complete product for small IT teams.
Affordable SSL monitoring, sized for your team
Free tier, unlimited domains, no card, no sales call. Set it up before the next stand-up ends.