Dead-man's-switch monitoring for cron jobs & backups. Pay once, own it forever.
Developers rent API docs, monitoring, secrets and webhook plumbing by the month for side projects that earn nothing yet. Self-hosted pay-once utilities cost less than one month of the SaaS they replace.
The tool this job usually means renting is Cronitor, at $10/mo — roughly $120 a year, every year. Pingcron does the job for a one-time $79 — running on infrastructure you control.
"Expected every N minutes/hours" or a full 5-field cron expression with timezone support and a live next-3-runs preview.
For developers, two schedule types pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $79, not metered per month.
Allow N seconds of lateness per check before alerting — no false alarms because a backup ran 40 seconds long.
For developers, grace periods pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $79, not metered per month.
Webhook (Slack/Discord/ntfy-friendly JSON) + SMTP email on down, recovery and explicit failure. Never spams repeats, survives restarts without re-firing.
For developers, alerts on transitions only pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $79, not metered per month.
One-time $79 for the packaged 1-click Windows installer with lifetime updates — no terminal required.
Desktop app for personal use, or docker compose up on a $5 VPS. One process, one SQLite file — back up one file and you've backed up everything.
Append && curl -fsS https://your-host/ping/TOKEN to any job. The moment a ping is late or missing, you get alerted.
Pingcron is $79, once. Cronitor at $10/mo — roughly $120 a year, every year. Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.
Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months. Pingcron costs $79 once; Cronitor charges $10/mo — about $120 a year. For developers, that fixed cost is the whole point: the tool is a one-time line item, not a monthly one.
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.
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.