Ookla’s Downdetector service starts rolling out new Pro plan, but it’s not cheap

Global internet and network connection benchmarking firm Ookla, which operates the popular Speedtest.net broadband connection testing website and app, has announced that their similarly popular internet outage monitoring service – Downdetector – is to start making a new ‘Pro’ plan available (the existing service is free). But it’ll cost you.

At present the Downdetector service is fairly basic in that you can use it to report outages of popular internet services (inc. UK broadband and mobile providers) and see the reports that others have made. On top of that you can also use your Speedtest.net account to select five favourites (e.g. your broadband ISP) to monitor, which will send you a notification if any significant problems are detected, based on wider user feedback.

The new Downdetector Pro plan, which is first going live in Australia, goes a bit further by allowing you to track up to ten favourites (via both the app and website), while also adding Proactive Mobile Alerts (receive up to 10 push notifications per day – one per favourite per day) through the app. The plan also synchronises this across different platforms and removes adverts.

Overall, it seems like a fairly minor set of improvements and not the sort you’d normally expect to cost a lot of money, but despite this the Pro plan is currently being priced at $13.99 (AUS) in Australia or roughly £7.44 GBP. The Pro plan has yet to launch in the UK, so we don’t yet know how much it will cost here, although charging almost the same as Netflix’s entry-level plan for such basic improvements doesn’t seem particularly attractive.

In addition, there’s also an Enterprise plan with some much more interesting features (e.g. API access, up to 5 years of outage history, monitoring for up to 100 services, custom alerts etc.), which is something that would have made much more sense at the above price point. But Ookla doesn’t say how much they’ll charge for that and we suspect it’ll be significantly more expensive than $13.99.

In terms of availability in the UK, Ookla has only said that additional markets will be “coming soon“. Overall, we can’t help but feel that this new strategy partly reflects the recent acquisition by Accenture, which always seemed likely to adopt a more commercial approach.