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.
Key Features
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.
Pricing
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.
Key Features
Dead man's switch monitoring — Jobs ping Healthchecks on success; if a ping is missed within the expected window, an alert fires automatically.
Cron expression scheduling — Checks can be defined with simple periods or full cron syntax, with a configurable grace period for minor timing drift.
Timing pings — Optional start/success pings let Healthchecks report how long a job actually took to run, surfacing slow jobs as well as failed ones.
Multi-channel alerting — Notifications can go out via email, SMS, WhatsApp, phone call, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams or webhooks.
Self-hosting option — The complete Django/Python codebase is open source on GitHub, so the exact hosted product can be run on your own servers for free.
Projects and team access — Checks can be organized into projects with shared team access and role-based permissions.
Ping logs and history — Every check keeps a log of recent pings so you can audit exactly when a job ran, succeeded or failed.
Read-only and badge URLs — Status badges and read-only API endpoints make it easy to surface check status on dashboards or status pages.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Generous free tier (20 checks) that is genuinely usable, not just a trial
Fully open source with a self-hosting option for teams that need data control
Simple, transparent, developer-friendly pricing with no hidden limits
Wide range of alert integrations covering most on-call and chat tools
Run and maintained by a founder with a long, public track record of reliability
Cons
As a one-person company, support responsiveness can vary compared to larger vendors
Higher check volumes require paid plans, which can add up for larger fleets of jobs
SMS, WhatsApp and phone call alerts are credit-limited even on paid tiers
No built-in uptime/website monitoring; it is focused specifically on scheduled job monitoring
Self-hosting requires managing your own Django/Python deployment and updates
Pricing
Hobbyist Free N/A
Supporter $5/month Monthly
Business $20/month ($16/month billed annually) Monthly or annual
Business Plus $80/month ($64/month billed annually) Monthly or annual
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Healthchecks.io actually monitor?
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.
Is Healthchecks.io free?
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.
Can I self-host Healthchecks.io?
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.
Who built Healthchecks.io?
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.
Do open-source projects get free access?
Yes, Healthchecks.io offers the Business plan free of charge to open-source projects and registered non-profits on request.
How is Healthchecks.io different from uptime monitors like Pingdom?
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.