Heartbeat monitoring
Your job pings a URL when it finishes. If the ping doesn't arrive on time, you get an alert.
Your cron jobs are probably broken right now. You just don't know it yet.
CronPulse sends you an email the moment a scheduled job misses its window — before your backups fail, your emails stop sending, or your data goes stale.
Notify me when it launches
Free · No credit card · First 3 monitors, no account needed
Set up heartbeat monitoring in 60 seconds
Create a monitor
Give your monitor a name and set the expected interval — hourly, daily, weekly, or a custom cron expression. Add a grace period so you're not alerted for a job that's 30 seconds late.
Add one line to your script
Copy the generated ping URL and add it to the end of your cron job. Works with curl, wget, fetch, requests — anything that can make an HTTP GET or POST.
bashcurl -s https://cronpulse.devencyclopedia.com/ping/your-monitor-idGet alerted when it stops
If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected window, you get an email alert immediately. No dashboard to check, no logs to scan — you find out before your users do.
What developers monitor with CronPulse
Built for solo developers and small teams running scheduled tasks on any stack — Next.js, Node.js, Python, Go, or bare shell scripts.
- Nightly database backups
- Daily newsletter digests
- Data sync jobs from external APIs
- ETL pipelines that clean or aggregate data
- CI/CD cleanup and maintenance jobs
- Scheduled report generation
- Recurring payment or billing jobs
- Cache warm-up tasks
Everything you need to monitor scheduled tasks. Nothing you don't.
Email alerts for missed cron jobs
Instant email notifications the moment a scheduled task misses its window.
Grace period per monitor
Set a buffer before an alert fires. A job that's 30 seconds late is fine. One that's 30 minutes late is not.
30-run ping history
See the last 30 executions at a glance. Spot patterns in failures before they become incidents.
Monitor status dashboard
A simple view of all your monitors: healthy, late, failed, or missed — plus the time of the last successful ping.
GET and POST support
The ping URL accepts both GET and POST, so it works with curl, fetch, requests, and any HTTP client.
No account for first 3 monitors
Create monitors without signing up. Grab a URL and start. Add your email address when you're ready for alerts.
Any language, any platform
Shell, Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes CronJobs — if it can make an HTTP request, it can ping CronPulse.
How CronPulse compares to other cron job monitoring tools
The cron monitoring market has good options. Here's where CronPulse fits relative to the most commonly used alternatives.
Healthchecks.io
Excellent open-source option with a generous free tier (20 monitors). CronPulse is simpler to set up and doesn't require an account for your first monitors — lower friction for developers who want to try it instantly.
Cronitor
The most feature-complete paid option, great for larger teams. CronPulse targets solo developers and small teams who don't need a full platform and don't want to pay for features they won't use.
Dead Man's Snitch
Clean and simple, but paid-only with no free tier. CronPulse is free to start and stays free for up to 3 monitors.
cron-job.org
A scheduler, not a monitor. It runs your jobs on a schedule but doesn't verify that the job's logic actually succeeded. Use cron-job.org to trigger tasks and CronPulse to confirm they completed.
Frequently asked questions
Is CronPulse free to use?
Yes. Create your first 3 monitors without an account and without a credit card. A paid tier for unlimited monitors, Slack alerts, and team collaboration is planned for a future release.
How does heartbeat monitoring work?
Your cron job sends a GET or POST request to a unique URL when it finishes. If that ping doesn't arrive within the expected interval plus your grace period, CronPulse sends you an email alert. One curl command. No agents. No infrastructure.
How is CronPulse different from cron-job.org?
cron-job.org runs scheduled jobs. CronPulse monitors them. They solve different problems and work well together: cron-job.org fires your task on a schedule, and CronPulse alerts you if the task didn't complete successfully.
Which languages and platforms does CronPulse support?
Anything that can make an HTTP request works: shell scripts with curl, Python, Node.js, Ruby, Go, GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes CronJobs. The ping is a single GET or POST request to your monitor's unique URL.
How is CronPulse different from Healthchecks.io?
Healthchecks.io is excellent and open-source. CronPulse is a lighter alternative focused on zero-friction onboarding — no account needed for your first 3 monitors. Grab a ping URL and start monitoring in under 60 seconds.
How quickly will I be notified of a missed cron job?
As soon as the grace period expires. For example, if your job is expected every hour with a 15-minute grace period, you get an email alert 1 hour and 15 minutes after the last successful ping.
Stop finding out about broken jobs from users
CronPulse is in development. Drop us an email to get notified on launch — first 3 monitors are free with no account required.
Notify me when it launches