The Downdetector alternative built for businesses, not consumers.
PulseWatch is the Downdetector alternative built for business teams. Downdetector is a great consumer signal but was never designed for the team that has to answer "is the outage real, who's affected, and what should support tell customers?" PulseWatch ships a public API, signed webhooks, audit logs, and a documented detection methodology — on every paid plan, not just enterprise.
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In one paragraph
Downdetector is a public-facing, ad-supported outage tracker optimized for end-consumer traffic. PulseWatch is an outage intelligence platform for the team that runs your product — with a REST API on every paid tier, signed webhook deliveries into PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack, an auditable detection methodology, vendor official-status ingestion, and admin controls (audit log, role-based access, configurable retention) your security team will actually approve.
Four problems business teams hit with Downdetector
We talk to operations, support, and engineering teams every week. The same four objections come up.
No API on the plans you can buy
Downdetector's API is gated behind enterprise sales. PulseWatch ships a documented REST API on Pro and Business — list services, fetch incidents, query 15-minute metric buckets, manage alert rules. No procurement call.
Read the API docs →No real webhook delivery
Real ops workflows demand webhook events with HMAC signatures, automatic retries, and a delivery health dashboard. PulseWatch ships all three on Pro and Business — so PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Statuspage, or your homegrown alerter can subscribe directly.
Webhook signature reference →No methodology you can audit
Procurement teams ask 'how do you detect outages?' Downdetector's answer is opaque. PulseWatch publishes the formulas, thresholds, anti-fake-report scoring, and confidence math — every customer can audit our detection like they audit their own.
Read the methodology →No admin controls for security review
Audit log of every plan/detection/team change, role-based access, configurable retention, signed deliveries — built in from day one. We're SOC2-ready by design, not 'available on enterprise.'
Security overview →PulseWatch vs Downdetector — feature by feature
Same crowdsourced signal you trust from Downdetector. Plus everything a business team actually needs.
| Feature | PulseWatch | Downdetector |
|---|---|---|
Built for business / engineering teams | ||
Public REST API On every paid plan, documented | Enterprise only | |
Signed webhook deliveries | ||
Per-incident confidence score | ||
Documented detection methodology | ||
Vendor official-status ingestion | ||
Synthetic monitoring probes | ||
Cross-vendor correlation banner "3 services down — possible AWS us-east-1" | ||
Embeddable status widgets | ||
Branded team status pages | ||
Free tier | Free forever | |
Starting paid price | $49/mo | Contact sales |
What each team actually does with PulseWatch
Three real workflows that move from "we noticed in Twitter" to "we acted before customers complained."
Customer support
Subscribe to your top-10 vendor watchlist with Slack delivery. When Stripe degrades, support sees it before tickets open and posts a banner in 30 seconds.
On-call engineering
Webhook into PagerDuty filtered to major-issue severity on production dependencies (AWS, Cloudflare, Auth0). Wake people up only when a third-party is the cause.
Operations / vendor management
Pull our REST API into your reliability dashboard. Track 90-day uptime per vendor, prove SLA breaches at renewal time, defend procurement decisions with data.
Common questions from teams switching
How is your detection different from Downdetector's?+
We use the same crowdsourced signal AND ingest each vendor's official status page AND run synthetic probes from multiple regions. Three independent signals, fused with a documented confidence score on every incident. No mock data, no opaque thresholds.
Can we replace our existing uptime monitor?+
No — and we don't want you to. Uptime monitors check whether YOUR endpoints respond. PulseWatch tells you when the THIRD-PARTY services your product depends on are degraded. The two are complementary; most of our customers run both.
What does it cost for a small ops team?+
Pro is $49/mo (or $490/yr) and includes the REST API, signed webhooks, Slack delivery, and 90-day incident history. Business is $149/mo with a year of history, 10 team seats, and higher API quotas. Enterprise is custom. There's a permanent free tier for evaluation.
Do you support SSO?+
SAML SSO is not available yet. If it is a requirement for your team, contact sales so we can prioritize it. Admin actions are recorded in an audit log on every plan.
What if a real outage is missing from PulseWatch?+
Email support@pulsewatch.us with the service and time window. Confirmed misses feed directly into detection tuning, and the methodology page documents how we calibrate.
A Downdetector alternative your engineering team will actually use.
Build your first watchlist in two minutes. Wire up a webhook in five. Cancel any time on the paid plans.