Pingcron vs Cronitor pricing: $360 vs $79 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

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 $79.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Cronitor actually costs over one, two and three years, what Pingcron gives you for $79 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Cronitor actually costs you

At $10/mo, one Cronitor subscription adds up to $120 every year — $360 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Pingcron is $79 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $281 — and every year after that adds another $120 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Pingcron vs Cronitor, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $79, once

Your jobs ping a URL when they run — Pingcron alerts you when a ping is late or missing. The highlights:

• ⏱️ 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.

Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One-time $79 for the packaged 1-click Windows installer with lifetime updates — no terminal required.
2. Run it anywhere. 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.
3. Add one line to your crontab. Append && curl -fsS https://your-host/ping/TOKEN to any job. The moment a ping is late or missing, you get alerted.

When paying Cronitor is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Cronitor's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $10/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Pingcron is $79, once. For the deeper dive, read the Pingcron vs Cronitor head-to-head or the full Cronitor comparison.

Frequently asked 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 $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.

Why not just self-host Healthchecks.io?
Honestly? Healthchecks.io's OSS self-host is excellent and more mature — if you're happy assembling a Django/Postgres deployment, use it. Pingcron is the "one process, one file, five minutes" version, with a desktop mode nobody else has.

Are the ping endpoints secure?
They're deliberately unauthenticated so plain curl works from any crontab — the unguessable token is the secret, with per-token rate limiting on top. Dashboard and API sit behind a password (set ADMIN_PASSWORD before exposing it).

More on Cronitor pricing

Pingcron — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns