Every sysadmin has the same scar: a backup cron that silently died months ago, discovered only when the restore was needed. Cronitor charges $10/month, forever, to catch that. Pingcron is the same dead-man's switch — ping URLs, cron expressions, grace periods, webhook and email alerts — running on your own box for a one-time $29.
If you've searched for a Cronitor alternative, Pingcron is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Pingcron is $29, one time, and covers the same core job Cronitor charges $10/mo for.
What makes Pingcron the pick for 2026
- 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.
Pingcron vs Cronitor, at a glance
| Pingcron | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29 once | $10/mo solo ($120/yr), $50/mo team |
| Cost over 3 years | $29 | $360+ |
| Checks | Unlimited | Tiered |
| Your data | On your box (one SQLite file) | Their cloud |
| Cron expressions + timezones | Yes | Yes |
| Run duration tracking (start/end) | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop app | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $29, once — it pays for itself in 3 months.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/pingcron-mvp and always will be. The $29 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.
The bottom line
Pingcron won't out-feature Cronitor on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $29 once against $10/mo forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Pingcron is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Pingcron — $29, once
Your jobs ping a URL when they run — Pingcron alerts you when a ping is late or missing.