Read our 2026 review of Healthchecks.io: cron and background job monitoring, pricing tiers, self-hosting, pros and cons, and top alternatives compared.
Healthchecks.io monitors cron jobs and other periodic or background tasks using the dead man's switch pattern: your job pings a unique URL every time it runs, and Healthchecks alerts you the moment a ping fails to arrive on schedule. It was created in 2015 by Latvian developer Pēteris Caune, who still runs it as a one-person, bootstrapped SaaS business.
The full codebase is open source under a BSD license and available on GitHub, so teams can either use the hosted service at healthchecks.io or self-host the exact same software on their own infrastructure at no cost.
Each monitored job gets a unique ping URL, a configurable schedule (simple interval or cron expression) and a grace period before an alert fires. Timing pings let you track how long a job takes to run, not just whether it ran.
Alerts route through email (always free), SMS, WhatsApp, phone calls, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams and generic webhooks, making it straightforward to plug Healthchecks into an existing on-call or incident response workflow.
The free Hobbyist plan covers 20 checks with 100 log entries each, enough for many solo developers to never pay. Paid tiers scale up from there: Business at 20 dollars a month (100 checks, SMS/call credits) and Business Plus at 80 dollars a month (1,000 checks, higher credit allowances), both discounted roughly 20 percent on annual billing.
Open-source projects and non-profits can request the Business plan free of charge, and the company donates 5 percent of monthly revenue back to open-source dependencies.
It monitors whether your cron jobs, scheduled scripts and background tasks actually run on time, using a dead man's switch: your job pings a URL on success, and Healthchecks alerts you if that ping doesn't arrive.
Yes, the Hobbyist plan is free and supports up to 20 checks. Paid plans start at 5 dollars a month for supporters and scale to 20 and 80 dollars a month for higher check limits and SMS/call credits.
Yes. The full source code is open source under a BSD license and available on GitHub, so you can run the same software on your own servers instead of using the hosted SaaS.
It was built and is still run by Pēteris Caune, a Python developer based in Valmiera, Latvia, as a one-person bootstrapped company that launched the service in July 2015.
Yes, Healthchecks.io offers the Business plan free of charge to open-source projects and registered non-profits on request.
Uptime monitors check from the outside whether a website responds. Healthchecks.io instead relies on your own jobs checking in, which catches silent failures like a cron job that stops running entirely rather than just a website going down.