Pingcron is dead-man's-switch monitoring for cron jobs, backups, and scheduled tasks — the failures you only discover when it's too late. Your job hits a unique ping URL every run; Pingcron alerts you the moment a ping is late or missing. Cronitor charges $10/month ($360 over 3 years) and Healthchecks.io hosted is $20/month for Business — Pingcron is $29 once, unlimited checks, on your own box.

Built for sysadmins, indie hackers, and anyone with a backup script they haven't checked in months.

• Two schedule types: "every N minutes/hours" or full 5-field cron expressions with timezones and a live next-3-runs preview

• Per-check grace periods — no false alarms from a slow run

• Alerts on transitions only: webhook (Slack/Discord/ntfy-friendly JSON) + SMTP email; never spams repeats

• Run-duration tracking via /start and /ping endpoints

• Dashboard with live status pills, uptime %, and ping-history sparklines

• Full ping event log with source IPs and copy-paste curl snippets

• Public embeddable SVG status badges per check

• One process, one SQLite file

Runs as a Windows desktop app or on a $5 VPS (Docker included).

What's included:

• Windows installer download (build via npm run dist)

• Full source access — https://github.com/bensblueprints/pingcron (MIT)

• Lifetime v1 updates

• Setup guide (README quick start)

• Premium tiers coming later