Built by engineers. For engineers.
PingForce is monitoring software written by someone who got tired of enterprise quotes — and built the tool he wanted to use.
Monitoring shouldn’t cost more than the thing being monitored.
PingForce exists because the existing options were broken. Enterprise tools like ThousandEyes, Catchpoint, and Datadog do the job — but they’re priced for Fortune 500 procurement departments. Quotes start in the tens of thousands per year, and they assume you have a vendor management team and a sales engineer on speed dial. Most engineers don’t. Most small businesses don’t. Most teams that actually need monitoring can’t justify enterprise pricing for what should be a self-serve tool.
The other end of the market — Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Better Stack — costs less but treats monitoring as a checkbox feature. Single-probe checks. No probe network. No real way to verify whether a problem is global or regional. And when you need to troubleshoot, you’re left guessing. PingForce was built to live in the gap: serious capability with self-serve pricing, real probe-network testing without a five-figure annual commitment.
“The truth is, I built this because I wanted to create something genuinely useful for other network engineers. There’s no CEO, no board of directors, and no investors pushing for profit over practicality. It’s just one network engineer who values utility above everything else.
I’m always open to new ideas, feature requests, or improvements. If you’re using PingForce in a way I didn’t expect, or if there’s something missing that would make your life easier — I want to hear about it. This tool gets better when the people who actually use it tell me what they need.”
Reach out anytime: brian+1@pingforce.net
Four principles. No compromises.
These aren’t marketing differentiators. They’re the design constraints that shaped every feature.
Multi-cloud, not single-provider
Most monitoring tools run all their probes on AWS, or all on GCP. That’s not network diversity — that’s a single point of failure with a marketing budget. PingForce’s probe network spans seven cloud providers: AWS, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, GCP, Hetzner, and Azure. When AWS us-east-1 hiccups, our probes outside AWS keep reporting accurate data.
Bring your own probe
Your infrastructure has corners nobody else’s probe network can reach — internal networks, branch offices, specific egress points, customer-facing edge nodes. Deploy a PingForce probe anywhere (any cloud, any datacenter, even a Raspberry Pi). If you contribute it back to the shared community network, you earn extra slots in return.
Self-serve, forever
No sales calls. No procurement theater. No "schedule a demo" wall. Pick a tier, paste a URL, get alerts. If a feature isn’t clear in the docs, that’s a docs bug — not a reason to talk to a human. The day PingForce needs a sales team is the day we’ve lost the plot.
Slot pricing, not per-host gouging
Enterprise monitoring tools charge $300–$800 per host per month — and that’s before you add features. PingForce uses a slot model: pay for simultaneous testing capacity, not per check, per host, or per anything-they-can-meter. The result is predictable pricing that scales with your actual usage, not your line-item exposure.
Forty-plus probes. Seven clouds. One unified network.
Network diversity isn’t a marketing claim — it’s an architecture decision. Here’s how the probe network is actually distributed.
Probes are distributed across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and Africa — with deliberate clustering at major Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) for optimal path diversity. Network paths from different cloud providers traverse different transit backbones, peer through different IXPs, and resolve through different DNS infrastructure. When one provider’s network sees a problem, the others provide the ground truth.
And you can add your own. Customer-deployed probes extend the network to your infrastructure — internal subnets, branch offices, edge locations.
Learn about BYOPWhat’s shipping next. (No vaporware.)
Here’s what’s actually in the queue. If it’s not on this list, we haven’t started building it — and we won’t promise you something we haven’t started building.
EU Monitor Group
Monitor checks currently run from two US locations. EU monitor probes are actively being deployed — broadening coverage for European customers and adding regional verification for global SaaS.
US + EU Monitor Group
A combined monitor group that runs checks from both US and EU locations simultaneously. Confirms whether outages are region-specific or truly global before you wake your engineer.
Baseline-Relative Thresholds
Most alerts today fire on fixed thresholds (latency over 500ms, etc.). Baseline-relative thresholds alert on deviation from learned normal behavior — catching gradual degradation that fixed thresholds miss. Planned as a premium-tier feature.
Auto 40-Probe Test & Tracking
Schedule recurring tests from all 40+ probe locations and track results over time. See exactly when traffic patterns shift, when routing changes, and when regional performance degrades — without manually triggering tests.
Geo-Routed Monitor Checks
Monitor checks could automatically run from the lowest-latency location relative to the target, with daily re-evaluation. Useful for global SaaS where 'closest probe' is a better signal than 'all probes everywhere.' Still in design — anti-flapping logic needs to be solid before this ships.
Hong Kong Probe
A Hong Kong probe location for visibility into China-adjacent network paths. Useful for businesses serving customers in mainland China or East Asia. On the radar, not yet prioritized.
Roadmap reflects active priorities as of May 2026. Things move around as feedback comes in — open issues and feature requests inform what gets prioritized.
PingForce won’t replace your APM. And other things we won’t pretend to do.
Honest framing: we’re a monitoring tool, not a stack-in-a-box. Here’s what we don’t pretend to do.
Not an APM
No application-level tracing, no code instrumentation, no flamegraphs. Use Datadog APM or Sentry for that.
Not a log aggregator
We don’t ingest or search application logs. Use Loki, Datadog Logs, or BetterStack for that.
Not a security product
No WAF, no DDoS mitigation, no vulnerability scanning. Use Cloudflare or your hosting provider’s security tooling.
Not a CDN
We don’t serve or cache your traffic. We watch what’s already serving.
Not a synthetic transaction monitor
Single-endpoint HTTP checks, not multi-step user-journey simulation (login → cart → checkout). That’s a different problem.
Not a real-user monitoring tool
We don’t collect telemetry from your end users’ browsers. That’s RUM. Different product category.
If this resonates,
join the rebels.
No sales call. No procurement. Just a URL, a free tier, and a tool that gets out of your way.