Cronitor vs Healthchecks.io vs Better Stack for Indie Hackers in 2026

A cron job that dies loudly is easy. Your error tracker catches the exception. The hard ones are the job that silently stops being scheduled, and the job that still runs but now takes nine minutes instead of forty seconds because a table grew. Our cron monitoring roundup covered six tools. These three split on exactly that second failure.

My pick is Healthchecks.io for most people. Cronitor if slow jobs are the thing that actually hurts you. Prices were checked on September 23, 2026.

Quick Verdict

Heartbeats vs Duration Tracking: What's the Difference?

A plain heartbeat is a timer. Your job pings a URL when it's done, and if the ping misses the deadline plus a grace period, you get an alert. It catches dead jobs and knows nothing about duration.

Duration tracking needs two pings, one at the start and one at the end. Now the monitor can see a job that started and never finished, one that finished far too quickly (usually a sign it bailed early), and one that's slowly getting worse.

Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io does one thing and prices it fairly. The free Hobbyist plan covers 20 jobs with 100 log entries each. Business is $20 a month for 100 jobs, 1,000 log entries per job, 50 SMS and WhatsApp credits and 20 phone call credits, or $16 a month billed annually.

It sits in the middle on duration. You can send a /start signal, and Healthchecks then shows run times and marks the job down if the success ping doesn't arrive within the grace time. So "stuck" is covered. "Finished suspiciously fast" isn't. Schedules can be a simple period, a cron expression with a timezone, or systemd's OnCalendar format, which matters when your job runs at 03:00 Europe/Rome and not every 24 hours.

And it's BSD 3-Clause open source. The hosted service runs the same code you can deploy yourself, so the pricing risk is close to zero.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone who wants uptime checks, status pages and heartbeats from one vendor. This is cron monitoring only.

Pick this if you want the free tier that covers a real app, and an exit if the price ever changes.

Cronitor

Cronitor is the one built around the job lifecycle. Jobs report run, complete and fail events, and you write assertions like metric.duration < 30 minutes or metric.duration > 5 seconds. A backup job that "succeeds" in two seconds almost certainly backed up nothing.

The CLI helps too. cronitor sync reads your crontab and adds monitoring to each job, and cronitor exec wraps a command so it reports start, finish and exit status without you hand-writing curl calls.

The free Hacker plan gives you 5 monitors, 1 user and email and Slack alerts at 5 minute checks. Business has no base fee. It's $2 a month per monitor plus $5 a month per user, with SMS, PagerDuty and the other on-call integrations, 30 second checks and 12 months of retention. Fifteen monitors for a solo founder comes to $35 a month.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone with more than 5 jobs who doesn't need duration checks. Healthchecks does 20 for free.

Pick this if a slow or empty job run has ever cost you more than $35.

Better Stack

Better Stack treats heartbeats as one part of an uptime and incident product. The free plan includes 10 uptime monitors, 10 heartbeats and a status page, with Slack and email alerts. Your job pings a URL on success, or appends /fail with an exit code to report an error.

It's a plain heartbeat, though. You set "expect a heartbeat every" to a frequency plus a grace period. There's no cron expression and no start signal in the docs, so no duration tracking.

Paid pricing is per responder. $34 a month, or $29 on annual billing, for Uptime plus Telemetry. Extra heartbeats cost $20 a month per 10, and that adds up fast if you schedule a lot of small jobs. It's also in our uptime monitoring roundup.

Who shouldn't use it: anyone with 30 cron jobs. The heartbeat packs cost more than Healthchecks Business for the same coverage.

Pick this if you already want uptime monitoring and a status page, and your cron jobs fit inside 10 heartbeats.

Head-to-Head: Which Catches What?

For a solo developer running a Laravel scheduler or a handful of crontab entries, Healthchecks wins. Cronitor only earns its fee when the job's duration carries information. Better Stack wins if you'd pay for uptime monitoring anyway. If your jobs run on a queue rather than cron, the background job tools roundup is the better starting point.

Final Recommendation

Start on Healthchecks.io, with /start pings on the two or three jobs that matter. Move to Cronitor if you ever get burned by a job that "succeeded" without doing anything. Use Better Stack if your uptime monitoring already lives there. Cron monitoring doesn't replace an error tracker either. Pair it with one from our Sentry alternatives list.

Found a better option? Let me know on Twitter @devtoolpicks.