Looking for dirt-cheap monitoring that actually pages me

Paged me via a Nokia 3310 over SMS gateway. Total cost: zero, if you don't count the electricity and my sanity.

They don't make them like that anymore. Now I run a handful of 15€/year boxes at Hetzner and Leaseweb, and I can't justify UptimeRobot's paid tier for hobby stuff. The free tier checks every five minutes, which might as well be a geological epoch if you're running game servers.

What are people using in 2025-2026 for actually cheap monitoring that pages you? Self-hosted is fine. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 gathering dust. Would rather not spend 60€/year on monitoring for 180€/year of servers. Feels wrong.

Uptime kuma | docker compose up | ntfy selfhosted | push to phone | total cost zero | your pi3 is enough | grep the docs | sort -u | wc -l | fifteen minute setup | cat brain | grep insight | I run this stack | pipe dream made real | sed 's/complexity/simplicity/g'

I run exactly this! Uptime Kuma on old laptop, ntfy on same machine, works perfectly! Sent ticket yesterday to Hetzner about nothing related, but their network is stable enough that I rarely get paged for real problems.

Steps that worked for me:

• Docker on your Pi3, no problem
• Uptime Kuma with ~30 monitors uses 200MB RAM
• Ntfy with default config, no tuning needed
• Both on same host, but monitor external targets only

Made test order with ntfy pro to support developer, but free tier is enough! Only catch: your Pi3 needs reliable power and network, or you monitor the monitor! Cheers!

Sorry, total noob here is ntfy hard to set up?? I have a Time4VPS box and I tried uptime robot free (https://uptimerobot.com) but I missed a 3 hour outage because 5 minute checks...

Also sorry if this is dumb but does selfhosted mean I need to open ports?? My vps has firewall and im scared of breaking something