Free DMARC monitoring — what actually exists, and where free ends
You can monitor DMARC for exactly €0 — the reporting mechanism is built into the standard. Whether you should depends on how you value the hours. Here is the honest map of what free gets you.
Level 0: a mailbox and patience
Add rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.dk to your DMARC record and receivers send you aggregate reports — free, standard, complete data. The catch: they arrive as gzipped XML, one file per receiver per day (a modest domain easily gets 10–30/day), and reading them by hand stops being fun on day three. It works for a single low-volume domain and a one-time alignment cleanup. Our free XML-to-Human converter makes the individual files readable with sources identified by name.
Level 1: free checks and MonitorBase Free
Free one-shot tools (ours included: health check, SPF Surveyor, DKIM Inspector/Validator, DMARC Inspector/Wizard, BIMI Inspector) answer "is my setup correct right now?" — snapshots, no trend, no alerts. MonitorBase's Free plan adds the missing continuity for one domain: weekly automatic re-checks with history, so configuration drift gets caught. What Free deliberately lacks: alerts, daily cadence, and RUA analytics.
Where paying beats parsing
The math is plain: at €16/month excl. VAT (Basic), ingesting and analyzing your reports — sources identified, compliance trended, alerts on new senders and record changes — costs less than fifteen minutes of anyone's monthly time. That is roughly what hand-reading a single day's XML takes. Free is genuinely fine for a hobby domain or a one-off audit; the moment a domain earns money, the monitoring bill is noise compared to one missed deliverability incident. Start free either way — the free plan needs no card, and downgrading to Free keeps your history.
Free tools that help
- XML-to-Human Converter: Paste or upload a DMARC aggregate report and read it as a table with named sources.