The price anchor
| Pingcron | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $10/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $120 |
| 5-year total | $79 | $600 |
| 10-year total | $79 | $1,200 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($10/mo, ~$120/yr); the Pingcron column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Cronitor charges $360 over three years. Pingcron is $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.
- After 1 year: Pingcron has cost you $79 total — Cronitor has cost $120.
- After 3 years: Pingcron is still $79 — the subscription is at $360.
- After 5 years: Pingcron is still $79 — the subscription is at $600.
What you get for $79 once
- 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.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $79 is the whole price.
Pricing 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.
Pingcron — $79, one time
Or get Pingcron plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.