Great product. Unpredictable pricing.

Better Stack charges $29/mo per responder. That's per person who needs phone/SMS alerts or on-call rotation. A 3-person team with 100 monitors lands at roughly $129/mo. Add a fourth person and you're at $158/mo. The bill grows every time you hire.

Larm Pro is $19/mo. Ten team seats, 100 monitors, SMS alerts included. Add your fifth, sixth, tenth team member and the price stays the same. No per-responder math, no surprise invoices when the team grows.

Better Stack is a Czech company, but their infrastructure runs on AWS. Amazon owns AWS. Amazon is a US company subject to the CLOUD Act. US authorities can compel access to data stored on AWS regardless of where the servers physically sit. Being a European company on American infrastructure doesn't give you European data sovereignty.

Larm runs on EU-owned infrastructure under EU jurisdiction. Your monitoring data is genuinely protected by European data protection law, not just geographically close to it. For teams navigating GDPR, DORA, or NIS2, this is the difference that matters.

Better Stack started as uptime monitoring, but they've expanded into logs, traces, dashboards, AI SRE, and more. That breadth means complexity. In the product, in the pricing, and in what you're actually paying for. Most teams just need to know if their stuff is up.

Larm does uptime monitoring and status pages. That's it. We do it well, we price it simply, and we don't bundle features you'll never use into tiers you can't avoid. If you need a full observability platform, Better Stack is a reasonable choice. If you need monitoring, Larm is a better one.

Better Stack's free tier checks from a single location. Multi-location verification, the feature that actually prevents false positives, is gated behind paid plans. You get the most basic check on the free tier, and you pay to make it reliable.

Larm includes multi-location verification on every plan, including free. Six probe locations across three continents, majority-confirm alerting. When Larm alerts you, it's because multiple independent locations agree something is wrong. That shouldn't be a premium feature.

Better Stack gives you 10 monitors on the free tier. Need more? It's $21/mo for each additional pack of 50. A hundred monitors costs $42/mo in add-ons alone, before you add responder licenses for your team.

Larm Free gives you 15 monitors. Larm Pro gives you 100 monitors for $19/mo, including 10 team seats and SMS alerts. The math isn't complicated: you get more monitors, for less money, with more features included.