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.
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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.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I wondered how long money would get involved once ookla got bought out.
Pro/Enterprise plan offerings is interesting in context to the Openreach outage affecting parts of Isle of Wight affecting branches of some UK wide chains (also reported) and business in general (to be able to hold connectivity suppliers to account for service credits for outages).
Not sure how useful the enterprise offering is really. Any large enough service will have RUM running anyway, so would immediately be alerted to problems experienced by users. It is sometimes useful to be able to see if it’s a wider problem affecting other services. But for that the free version is fine.
Stuff the cost pro. Everything went crazy subscriptions fee. UK say ENOUGH is ENOUGH just like tv subscriptions fee. Madness.
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Can I interest you both in a keyboard subscription? The freemium level manages all your other subscriptions, monitors and alerts you to problems between keyboard and chair. For or a mere £5/month you get access to useful features such as finger fudge detection with auto correctiob.
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@BenInLondon LOL. You are giving them ideas.
@Phil, I agree with you about the subscription thing with some things. The streaming services, they have to make money, so subscription is needed. But for software the whole subscription thing went crazy with Adobe and Microsoft.
I know a fair few people who have dropped software subscriptions and gone for software like Affinity for photo and publisher stuff, one of the free office suites for office stuff and Davinci for video editing, plus others.
A lot of people seems to be now looking at other options, which is good.