PingCron

PingCron waits to hear from your jobs rather than checking on your server. Each monitor gets a private URL, and you add one request to the end of a job, after the backup finishes or the sync passes its checks. PingCron knows the schedule, timezone and grace period you set, so when a check-in that should have arrived doesn't, it records a missed run and sends an alert to email, Slack or Discord. Webhooks are available on paid plans.

The setup guide asks you to confirm the first heartbeat, then a later automatic run, then a test alert, so you know the whole chain works before you rely on it. Setup instructions cover shell or system cron and GitHub Actions, among others.

It suits anyone with jobs that matter but rarely get looked at, such as a nightly Postgres backup, an hourly payment reconciliation or a sync that runs every 15 minutes. The free plan's five monitors and seven days of history cover a small project. Pro at $9.99 a month raises that to 50 monitors and 30 days. Team at $29 adds shared access for ten people and public status pages, and Business at $79 removes the monitor limit and keeps a year of history.

Every plan can also connect Claude, ChatGPT or Codex, so you can ask about monitor status, run history and recorded incidents from a chat, with monitor creation and editing granted as a separate permission.

PingCron is careful to say what a heartbeat proves. It confirms a run reported success, not that the output was right, and alerts can take time to deliver after the grace period ends. The privacy policy, effective October 30, 2026, explains what it stores for accounts, monitors, alert destinations and optional GitHub connections, names Stripe, Vercel, Resend and PostHog among its providers, and gives a contact address for privacy requests.