You're welcome. Thanks for using the service and please, pass the word on. We live by word of mouth since it's impossible to outbid deep pocket ISPs and outages sites that would rather you don't find a service like ours.

Hi,

For almost ten years, a free version of the reports were available but two things happened to eventually have to go paid only.

First, our costs have gone up in every direction so offering the service for free is no longer sustainable. We are constantly maintaining, updating, and developing and offering the service at no cost is simply not possible anymore.
However, we do our best to make it very low cost. If $5.95 saves you even one hour of troubleshooting in one month, it's been paid for.

Second, we had a large base of free members but 99% of those members never interacted with us no matter how much we tried to get input and feedback.

Not getting any feedback makes it hard to improve, fix problems, and more importantly, hard to know what we should focus on and put more effort into.

Free services are often abused and are mostly offered by companies that have big investors behind them, willing to lose money to gain a user base. We don't have investors, we're a small company wanting to earn our keep by offering good services that people find useful.

I hope this helps to answer your question, and we hope you'll find OutagesIO useful too.

Thanks for the clarification.

Our agent doesn't have the capability to know about any other devices on your network because it doesn't have access to anything and is likely connected to a switch which doesn't allow devices to see each others traffic. It acts as just another connected item on your network.

However, it's what you don't see that can give you leads on what might be going on.

Check out this article which explains what the statuses are and I'll touch on it here as well;
Internet outages, alerts and agent statuses

The agent cannot monitor your modem or wireless signals but if you are seeing disconnections (Inactive) on a regular basis and if other devices on your network seem to lose Internet access, this might tell you something.

You can isolate these things as the agent will always report IP outages because this is something it can track. No matter how long the outage is, so long as the agent has power and is kept running, it will send its report as soon as it regains Internet access. If you don't see an outage report after being disconnected from the Internet, and especially if you were able to see the agent in 'Inactive' status (Using a mobile or another network), it very likely means the problem was not IP related but something else.

That could be anything from a bad cable to signal levels but if you know the problem is not IP outage related, it gives you a bit more to work with.

To know if these signal problems go beyond your own location, you could have a neighbor install and agent too and if you both see Inactive events around the same times, it tells you that it's more than likely the provider, something up the street and not your own location.

I hope this explanation make sense to you and is helpful.

These are the kinds of things we love to hear about.

Thank you for sharing this experience.