OneTimeDead-man's-switch monitoring for cron jobs & backups. Pay once, own it forever.
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.
Pingcron in 60 seconds
Everything in the box
Your jobs ping a URL when they run — Pingcron alerts you when a ping is late or missing.
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.
Pingcron vs Cronitor
Cronitor charges $10/mo. Here's what actually differs.
| Pingcron | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $79 once | $10/mo solo ($120/yr), $50/mo team |
| Cost over 3 years | $79 | $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 $79, once — it pays for itself in 8 months.
Pick how you pay
Subscriptions if you want them — but the whole point is the lifetime tier.
Up and running in three steps
Buy once on Whop
One-time $79 for the packaged 1-click Windows installer with lifetime updates — no terminal required.
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.
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.
Fair 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).
Related tools
More pay-once apps from the OneTimeSuite catalog.
More about Pingcron
Every page we publish about this app — comparisons, personas, platforms and the problems it solves.
Platforms
Solves
Stop renting. Own Pingcron.
Your jobs ping a URL when they run — Pingcron alerts you when a ping is late or missing.
Get Pingcron — $79 forever