🫀 Pingcron
Dead-man's-switch monitoring for cron jobs & backups. Pay once, own it forever.
Pingcron at a glance
| Price | $79, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Cronitor at $10/mo — roughly $120 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Developer Tools |
Pingcron features
⏱️ Two schedule types
"Expected every N minutes/hours" or a full 5-field cron expression with timezone support and a live next-3-runs preview.
🕊️ Grace periods
Allow N seconds of lateness per check before alerting — no false alarms because a backup ran 40 seconds long.
🔔 Alerts on transitions only
Webhook (Slack/Discord/ntfy-friendly JSON) + SMTP email on down, recovery and explicit failure. Never spams repeats, survives restarts without re-firing.
📟 Rich ping API
GET or POST /ping/:token, /start for run-duration tracking, /fail for explicit failures — ping bodies stored as logs.
📊 Dashboard
Live status pills, "last ping 3m ago", next expected ping, uptime % and ping-history sparklines.
🛡️ Public status badges
Embeddable SVG shield per check for your READMEs, plus a JSON status endpoint.
🖥️ Desktop or VPS
Run it as a Windows desktop app, or docker compose up on a $5 VPS when it needs to be public.
🔒 100% local
One Node process, one SQLite file. Your uptime data never leaves your box — no telemetry.
$79 once — that's the whole pricing page
Cronitor charges $10/mo — roughly $120 a year, every year. Pingcron is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Pingcron inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Pingcron guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/pingcron-mvp and always will be. The $79 buys the 1-click Windows installer and lifetime updates for people who don't want to touch a terminal.
How is this different from an uptime monitor?
Uptime monitors watch whether your site is up. They can't see a backup cron that "ran" but wrote to a read-only mount. Pingcron watches for the absence of a signal — your job pings when it finishes, and Pingcron yells when the ping doesn't arrive.
Will it spam me with repeat alerts?
No. Alerts fire only on state transitions — down, recovery, explicit failure — and the state machine is persisted, so a restart never double-alerts. If you want repeat-nagging until acknowledged, that's a thing Cronitor does that Pingcron deliberately doesn't.