Checkly Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs, and What You Actually Get

Checkly is a monitoring tool built for developers. It monitors APIs with full assertion chains and runs Playwright and Puppeteer browser scripts as continuous synthetic tests. Where traditional uptime tools check "is the URL returning 200?", Checkly checks "does the login flow complete successfully and does the API response contain the expected JSON fields?".

That difference in capability is reflected in the pricing model. Checkly doesn't charge per monitor - it charges per check run.

How Checkly Billing Works

One check run is one execution of one check. If you run 20 checks every 5 minutes, that's 20 runs × 12 times/hour × 24 hours = 5,760 runs/day, or roughly 172,800 runs/month.

This model means pricing scales with check frequency, not check count. More frequent checks on the same monitors cost more. Teams coming from traditional uptime tools need to calculate their expected run count before comparing prices.

Checkly's free plan gives 50,000 runs/month - enough for 1 check running every minute for 34 days, or 34 checks running every minute for 1 day.

Checkly Plans at a Glance

Additional check runs are available as add-ons. Additional user seats can be added to Team and Growth plans for $10/user/month.

What Each Plan Includes

Hobby - Free

Fifty thousand check runs per month with access to the full Checkly feature set. The Hobby plan includes:

• API checks with assertion chains (status, headers, body, response time)
• Browser checks using Playwright or Puppeteer scripts
• Multistep checks (multi-API transaction flows)
• 3 check locations (from Checkly's global network)
• Email alerting
• CLI-based check management
• Check groups for organization

The Hobby plan is the most capable free tier in the monitoring category by a significant margin. You get browser automation checks for free - features that cost hundreds of dollars per month at Datadog Synthetics or New Relic Synthetics. The constraint is 50K runs/month and 1 user. For a solo developer testing the platform, it's genuinely useful.

Team - $30/month

2.5 million check runs per month, 3 users, and full alerting integrations. The Team plan adds:

• All check locations (20+ globally)
• Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, MSTeams, and webhook alerts
• SMS alerting
• Retries on failure (reduces false positives)
• 90-day data retention
• Parallel check execution from multiple regions

For a team running 50 API checks every 5 minutes, the monthly run count is roughly 432,000 runs - well within the 2.5M limit. The Team plan covers most development teams' monitoring needs.

At $30/month, Team is more expensive than Freshping ($9/month) and Vantaj ($9/month) for equivalent monitor counts, but incomparable on check depth. A Checkly API check can verify HTTP status, response body contents, specific JSON fields, headers, and response time - in one check.

Growth - $100/month

7.5 million check runs per month and 10 users. The Growth plan adds:

• Priority support
• Audit logs
• Custom alert channels
• Expanded API access

The Growth plan suits teams running high-frequency checks across many services, or teams with 4–10 engineers sharing the monitoring workspace.

Scale - $300/month

25 million check runs per month with unlimited users. Scale targets large engineering teams running extensive synthetic monitoring across many services.

What Checkly Does Well

API Monitoring With Real Assertions

Checkly's API check is not a ping. You write assertion logic: the response must return 200, the body must contain a specific field, the Authorization header must be present, the response time must be under 800ms. Fail any assertion, get an alert.

Traditional uptime tools flag when a URL stops responding. Checkly flags when a URL responds incorrectly - a 200 response returning an error message in the JSON body, for example. That distinction catches bugs that uptime tools miss.

Browser Synthetic Tests With Playwright

You write Playwright scripts. Checkly runs them as continuous monitors from multiple locations. A checkout flow, login sequence, or search function runs as a real browser test every N minutes. You get alerted if any step fails.

This is categorically different from what uptime tools monitor. Vantaj and UptimeRobot tell you if the URL responds. Checkly tells you if the URL works.

Code-Native Check Management

Checkly's CLI lets you define checks as code, store them in version control, and deploy them as part of a CI/CD pipeline. Teams that already manage infrastructure as code can treat their monitoring configuration the same way.

Monitoring as Code Integration

Checks can be co-located with application code. Deploy new code, deploy new checks alongside it. Teams using Terraform or Pulumi can manage Checkly resources in the same IaC tooling.

Where Checkly Falls Short

Not a Traditional Uptime Tool

Checkly's model is optimized for deep API and browser checks, not simple HTTP uptime polling. For teams that just need to know "is our site up?", the check-run billing model is complex and the $30/month Team plan is overpowered and overpriced for that use case.

Free Plan Limits Multi-User Teams

The Hobby plan allows 1 user. Engineering teams can't share a Hobby workspace. The jump to Team ($30/month) is required the moment a second team member needs access.

No Native Status Page

Checkly doesn't include a public-facing status page. Teams that want a status page alongside their monitoring need a separate tool - Betterstack Telemetry, Instatus, or Statuspage. Every other tool in this comparison includes a status page at entry.

Check-Run Math Surprises

Teams from traditional tools don't think in check runs. Running 100 checks every 1 minute consumes 4.32 million runs/month - past the Team plan's 2.5M limit. At $30/month for Team, overage billing applies. Reading the pricing page without doing the arithmetic leads to unexpected bills.

No On-Call Scheduling

Like Freshping, Checkly routes alerts to integrations but doesn't manage on-call rotations. PagerDuty or Opsgenie are required alongside Checkly for on-call management.

Checkly vs. Alternatives: Price Comparison

Checkly is the most capable tool in this table for developers who need to verify that their application actually works, not just that the server responds.

Calculating Your Checkly Cost

Before choosing a plan, calculate your expected monthly check runs:

Monthly runs = (number of checks) × (runs per hour) × 24 × 30

Examples:

• 20 API checks every 5 minutes = 20 × 12 × 24 × 30 = 172,800 runs/month (Hobby plan, free)
• 50 checks every 1 minute = 50 × 60 × 24 × 30 = 2,160,000 runs/month (Team plan, $30/month)
• 200 checks every 1 minute = 200 × 60 × 24 × 30 = 8,640,000 runs/month (Growth plan, $100/month)

High-frequency checks on many endpoints move you up tiers faster than check counts alone suggest.

Who Checkly Is For

Checkly works well for:

• Developers who need API monitoring with assertion logic - not just status code checks
• Teams running end-to-end browser tests as continuous synthetic monitors using Playwright
• Teams with infrastructure-as-code workflows - checks in version control, deployed via CLI
• Solo developers and small teams - the Hobby free tier is genuinely capable

Checkly is harder to justify for:

• Teams that just need uptime alerts - Vantaj at $9/month or Freshping free tier handle this cheaper
• Teams that need a status page - Checkly requires a separate tool
• Teams that need on-call scheduling - Checkly requires a separate tool
• Non-technical teams - Checkly assumes familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript and Playwright

Annual vs. Monthly

Checkly offers annual billing with savings of roughly 15–20% on paid plans. The exact discount varies by tier.

The Bottom Line

Checkly pricing in 2026 starts free (50K runs/month) and scales to $30/month on Team. The pricing model is unique in the category - check runs, not monitors - which rewards infrequent but deep checks over high-frequency simple pings.

For developers who want to verify their application logic, not just their server availability, Checkly is the strongest tool in the category at this price. For teams that need basic uptime monitoring, alerting, and a status page, tools like Vantaj or Freshping do the job for less.