"Free status page" is a crowded search because a genuinely free tier exists in this category, not just a 14-day trial dressed up as one. The honest problem is that every vendor's free plan caps a different thing, so "free" does not mean the same product at five different companies. One free plan blocks a custom domain. Another caps subscribers at 100. A third gives you exactly one status page and one monitor and calls it a day. Picking a free tool without reading which cap you will hit is how a team ends up migrating six months in, at the worst possible time to migrate anything.
Below is what each vendor's own pricing page says today, not a reviewer's summary of it, plus where RealUptime's free tier lands on the same axes, including the parts that are not free.
What to check before picking one
Four things decide whether a free plan will actually last you:
- Subscriber cap. How many people can follow your status page by email before you hit a wall. This is the cap that bites without warning, because it scales with your customer count, not your usage.
- Custom domain. Whether the status page can live at
status.yourdomain.comor has to stay on the vendor's subdomain. For a company that has customers, this is closer to a requirement than a nice-to-have: a status page on someone else's domain reads as less official during the exact moment you need to be trusted. - Monitors and components. How many things you can actually watch, and whether the page can show more than one component's status independently.
- What happens at the cap. Some vendors let you keep operating over the limit with degraded service (emails stop sending past the subscriber cap, say); others force an upgrade before you can add the next subscriber.
The free plans, as of their current pricing pages
Instatus (Starter, free). 15 monitors, 200 subscribers, checks every 2 minutes, email alerts only, up to 5 team members. No custom domain: that is a Pro-plan feature ($29/month), which also raises the monitor cap to 50 and adds SMS alerts (voice/call alerts are a step up again, on the $99/month Business plan). For a team that only needs a public page and does not mind the instatus.com subdomain, this is a genuinely usable free tier. The domain restriction is the thing to know about before you build a marketing page that links to it.
Atlassian Statuspage (Free). 100 subscribers, 25 components, 2 team members, 2 metrics, with email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams notifications and REST API access included even on the free tier. Paid public-page plans start at $29/month (Hobby, 250 subscribers) and climb to $1,499/month (Enterprise, 25,000 subscribers); private pages for authenticated audiences are a separate, more expensive ladder starting at $79/month. Statuspage's free plan is the most feature-complete of the group on paper (API access, Slack, MS Teams, all on the free tier), but the 2-team-member cap is tight for anyone past a two-person on-call rotation.
Better Stack (free tier). A free status page on your own custom subdomain via a single CNAME record, with dark mode, interactive charts, and email subscriptions, bundled with 10 monitors and 10 heartbeats, 1 status page, and 1,000 status page subscribers before the $40/month add-on for another 1,000 kicks in. This is the one free plan in this list that includes a custom domain at no cost, which is worth knowing if a branded page is the deciding factor and the other limits (10 monitors, one status page) fit your current size.
OpenStatus (Hobby, free). One monitor, one status page with three components, and a 10-minute minimum check interval. Genuinely open source and self-hostable if you would rather run it yourself than accept any vendor's limits, with paid hosted plans starting at $30/month for 20 monitors and a 1-minute interval. The free tier here is closer to a proof of concept than something to run a real incident through, given one monitor and a ten-minute check gap, but self-hosting removes the cap entirely if you are willing to run the infrastructure.
RealUptime (Free). 10 monitors, checks from four regions, one public status page, email alerts, 3 team members, 100 status page subscribers. No custom domain on the free tier; that is a Growth-plan feature ($28.99/month), same tradeoff Instatus makes. Where RealUptime's free tier differs from the others: checks run from multiple regions by default rather than a single location, and the same free account includes the free tiers of Monitor and Errors without a second signup, so a team evaluating a status page also gets uptime monitoring and error tracking to compare against whatever else they are running.
The honest comparison, side by side
| Subscribers | Custom domain | Monitors | Status pages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instatus Starter | 200 | No | 15 | 1 (public) |
| Statuspage Free | 100 | Not on free | 25 components | 1 |
| Better Stack free | 1,000 | Yes | 10 | 1 |
| OpenStatus Hobby | Not published | No | 1 | 1 |
| RealUptime Free | 100 | No | 10 | 1 |
Two things stand out reading these side by side rather than one at a time. First, custom domain is the feature every vendor except Better Stack holds back from free, which tells you it is the actual lever vendors use to convert a free account rather than subscriber count or monitor count. If a branded domain matters to you now, Better Stack's free tier is worth a serious look before you assume you have to pay for one anywhere. Second, subscriber caps outside Better Stack's sit in the 100 to 200 range, enough for a company with a small number of customers who actually opt in to status updates, which in practice is a fraction of total customers; the cap becomes real only once a status page starts getting linked from onboarding emails or support macros, which is usually a sign the company should be paying for the product it is running its incident communication on anyway.
What we would tell a team picking between these today
If the honest answer is "we have fewer than a few hundred people who will subscribe, we do not need our own domain yet, and we mostly want to stop fielding 'is it down' tickets by hand," any of these free tiers does that job. Pick based on which paid tier you would actually grow into, because migrating a status page's incident history and subscriber list later is more friction than picking the right free plan today.
If a custom domain matters now, not later, that narrows the list to Better Stack's free tier or paying somewhere else from day one. If you specifically want the checks feeding the page to run from more than one region on the free tier itself, RealUptime Status and Better Stack are the two in this list that state a free-tier region count at all: RealUptime's free plan checks from four regions, Better Stack advertises multi-location checks as part of its standard monitoring without a published free-tier region count, and the others do not publish one either.
Start on whichever free tier you pick knowing exactly which cap you will hit first, not the one you assume you will hit. It is a five-minute read of a pricing page against the checklist above, and it is cheaper than migrating an incident history under pressure six months from now.