Monitor every project you ship — your portfolio, client work, side projects, MVPs. Webhooks, MCP server, public API, and a Free tier generous enough to actually use.
Freelance developers ship more projects than they can monitor manually. Your portfolio site, the client work from last year, the MVP you spun up last weekend, the side project that's quietly making $200/month — every one of them needs an uptime check, but no one is going to pay for SaaS-grade monitoring on a side project. Lemwatch's Free tier covers 10 sites with the full check suite; Pro ($19/month) covers 50. Webhooks plug into your existing on-call setup, the MCP server lets your AI assistant query monitoring data directly, and the public API means you can build the monitoring readout straight into your own dashboards. The pitch isn't 'replace your existing stack' — it's 'cover the dozen projects you can't justify Datadog for'.
The freelance/indie-dev workflow is fundamentally different from a corporate ops one. You don't have a runbook. You don't have an on-call rotation. You don't want to wake up at 3am because someone's MVP is throwing 500s. You want monitoring that's quiet by default, alerts only on real signal, plays nicely with your existing stack (Slack, Discord, webhooks, Cursor/Claude via MCP), and doesn't cost more than the projects make. Lemwatch is built around that. The Free tier is genuinely usable (not a 14-day trial); the Pro tier covers a freelancer's typical 20-50 project portfolio; the API and MCP integration let you wire the data into wherever you already look.
Free tier covers 10 sites; Pro is $19/mo for 50 — less than a billable hour
Multi-region confirmation + retry logic before alerting
Public API + MCP server expose every metric programmatically
Public status page per project, your branding, your subdomain
Per-page CWV tracking with regression alerts
Webhook alerts with full payload — drop into any system
10 sites, full check suite, no time limit, no credit card. Enough to monitor your portfolio + 3-4 client projects without ever opening a billing screen.
Native webhook delivery means alerts plug into PagerDuty, Discord, custom Slack apps, or whatever you've already built. MCP server lets Claude or Cursor query monitoring state directly from your editor.
Every check result, incident, and metric is readable via REST API with rate limits scaled to plan tier. Build the monitoring readout into your own dashboard.
Inverse-uptime checks for cron jobs and scheduled tasks. Get alerted when the cron you set up 6 months ago silently stops running.
Each project gets a public status page on a subdomain (status.yourproject.com). When paying customers ask 'is it down?', send a URL.
Different projects can alert different channels — side projects go to Discord, paying clients page via SMS-via-webhook, portfolio sites email weekly digests.
The Lemwatch MCP server lets Claude, Cursor, or any other MCP-compatible AI assistant query your monitoring state directly — current uptime, recent incidents, response times, etc. Means you can ask 'why is project X slow?' inside your editor and get real data, not a guess.
Actually free. 10 sites, no credit card, no time limit. The check suite is the same one Pro and Agency users get — just capped at 10 sites and lower check frequency.
Yes — Webhook alerts deliver a full JSON payload to any HTTPS endpoint, so any system that accepts webhooks works. Native integrations exist for Slack and Discord; everything else is one webhook URL away.
Yes. REST API with rate limits scaled to plan tier — Free gets enough to power a dashboard widget; Pro and Agency get bulk export and historical queries. API keys live under Settings → API.
Yes. Heartbeat monitoring is inverse-uptime: instead of pinging your URL, your cron pings ours. If the ping doesn't arrive on schedule, you get an alert. Works for any scheduled task.
No — Lemwatch is a SaaS. If self-hosting is a hard requirement, see our open-source-monitoring comparison page for alternatives. For most freelancers, the Free tier removes the cost concern that drives self-hosting.
Pro plan ($19/mo, 50 sites) + Heartbeat for any cron + Public Status Page for the customer-facing SLA. Total monitoring cost: less than the first month's revenue on most indie projects.