Healthchecks.io Pricing: Plans, Limits and Cost Per Job

Healthchecks.io costs $0, $5, $20 or $80 a month. The free Hobbyist plan monitors 20 cron jobs, Business monitors 100 for $20 and Business Plus monitors 1,000 for $80, and paying annually takes 20 percent off both paid tiers, exactly. That works out at $0.20 per job per month on Business and $0.08 on Business Plus, so the bigger plan is four times the price for ten times the capacity. The oddity on the price list is the $5 Supporter plan, which has identical limits to the free one. That is not a mistake, it is a donation tier, and the vendor labels it as such on their own page.

Healthchecks.io is a cron job monitoring service, which is a narrower thing than a website monitor. It does not check whether your site is up. It waits for your scheduled jobs to check in, and it tells you when one does not. That is the dead man switch pattern, and it catches the failure mode that ordinary monitoring cannot see: a nightly job that quietly stops running and takes three weeks to notice.

Everything below was read on 2 September 2026 from healthchecks.io/pricing in US dollars. The arithmetic is ours.

How much does Healthchecks.io cost?

Four plans, two of which cost real money and two of which have the same limits as each other.

The annual discount is exactly 20 percent and reconciles to the dollar in both directions. Business at $20 a month is $240 a year, and 20 percent off $240 is $192, which the page divides back to $16 a month. Business Plus at $80 is $960 a year, less 20 percent is $768, which is $64 a month. No rounding, no fine print.

What is the point of the $5 Supporter plan?

There is no functional point, and the vendor says so out loud. The Supporter plan carries exactly the same 20 job and 100 log entry limits as the free Hobbyist plan, and the pricing page prints the words "But what's the point?" directly on the card. Their FAQ is equally direct: the Supporter plan is offered for people whose usage fits the free tier but who want to pay something toward running it.

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Most software companies would have found something to put in a $5 tier, even if it was only a badge. Healthchecks.io shipped a plan whose entire value proposition is that you like the product. Their FAQ also confirms they give the Business plan away free to open-source projects and nonprofits, which fits the same posture.

What does Healthchecks.io cost per job?

This is the number that decides which plan you want, and it moves a lot between the two paid tiers.

Business Plus costs four times as much as Business and carries ten times as many jobs, so the cost per job falls 60 percent. That is the opposite of what several monitoring vendors do. StatusCake, for one, gets more expensive per uptime monitor as you move up its ladder, by 8.9 percent. Here the ladder points the right way.

The catch is that it is a step, not a slope. There is no per-job add-on rate published anywhere on the Healthchecks.io price list, so job 101 does not cost $0.20. Job 101 costs $60, because it moves you from the $20 plan to the $80 one. If you are sitting at 95 jobs and growing, that cliff is the thing to plan around, and it is worth checking whether some of those jobs can share a check.

Does Healthchecks.io charge per user?

The published price list does not meter people at all. It has exactly two meters on it, jobs and log entries per job, plus the SMS, WhatsApp and phone call credit allowances. There is no per-seat line, no seat count in any plan description and no add-on rate for an extra login anywhere on the pricing page.

That matters more than it sounds, because per-seat billing is where cron monitoring bills usually grow. If four people need to see which jobs failed last night, on a per-seat tool that is four times something. Worth confirming with the vendor before you commit a team to it, since absence from a price list is not the same as a written guarantee, but on the published page there is nothing to pay.

Healthchecks.io vs Cronitor: what does the same job count cost?

Cronitor is the obvious rival, and the two price the same job in completely different ways. Cronitor charges $2 a month per monitor on its Business plan with no base fee and no minimum, plus $5 a month per dashboard user. Healthchecks.io charges a flat plan fee and counts jobs against an allowance. Both figures below were read from the vendors' own pricing pages within a day of each other.

Those multiples are large enough that they need explaining rather than just displaying, because a 25x gap usually means the two products are not really the same product. Some of it is genuine difference. Cronitor's $2 monitor covers job monitoring, uptime checks and heartbeats interchangeably, so a Cronitor monitor can watch a web page and a Healthchecks.io check cannot. Cronitor also runs checks as often as every 30 seconds and bundles SCIM and role-based access on the Business plan.

But if what you have is a crontab and you want to know when an entry stops firing, you are buying the same outcome from both, and the gap is real. A hundred cron jobs is $20 a month against $200. We took Cronitor's full price list apart separately in the Cronitor pricing breakdown, including the detail that its Business plan includes exactly one status page, the same as its free tier, and that branding it costs $25 a month per page.

What are log entries, and when do 100 stop being enough?

A log entry is one recorded ping from a job. Healthchecks.io keeps a history of check-ins for each job so you can audit what ran and when, and the plan limit caps how many it retains before the oldest ones roll off. The free and Supporter plans keep 100 per job, both paid plans keep 1,000.

Whether 100 is enough is purely a function of how often the job runs, and the vendor gives the arithmetic themselves: a weekly job fills 100 entries in about two years, while a job running every five minutes fills them in about eight hours. So the practical rule is that the free tier's history is generous for daily and weekly jobs and nearly useless for anything running on a short interval. If you need to answer "did this run at 3am last Tuesday" for a five-minute job, you need a paid plan.

This is also the honest reason to upgrade that has nothing to do with job count. Plenty of teams sit at twelve jobs, well inside the free 20, and pay $20 a month purely for retention and alert credits.

Is Healthchecks.io free forever?

Yes. The Hobbyist plan is a permanent free tier rather than a trial, and it covers 20 jobs with 100 log entries each and email alerting. The limits it enforces are real, though, and the vendor asks directly that you not open multiple accounts to get around them, describing that as abuse in their FAQ.

What the free plan does not include is any paid alerting channel. SMS, WhatsApp and phone call credits start on Business. If your escalation path is email and a chat webhook, free covers it. If a human needs to be woken up by a ringing phone, it does not.

Which plan should you buy?

What cron monitoring does not tell you

Worth being clear about the boundary, because it is the most common reason teams end up paying for two tools. A heartbeat check knows that your job pinged. It does not know that your site is up, that your certificate expires in nine days, that a DNS record changed, or that an API is returning 200 with an empty body. Those are different checks, and a cron monitor will report a perfectly healthy crontab while your checkout page is down.

Most teams past a certain size want both, and buying them separately means two bills, two alert configurations and two places to look at 3am. If you would rather have scheduled jobs, uptime, SSL, DNS, ports and API responses drawing on one allowance with a status page attached, that is what cron and heartbeat monitoring inside Uptimehub is for, and the wider mechanics of the pattern are covered in our guide to cron job monitoring.

The silent-failure problem is not limited to infrastructure jobs either. Any recurring automated run can stop without complaining, and the ones that cost money tend to be the ones nobody watches: month-end billing exports, nightly data syncs, and scheduled outbound email sends that quietly stop leaving the queue while the dashboard still shows the campaign as active. The fix is always the same shape. Make the job report that it finished, and alert on the absence of that report rather than on an error you were never going to receive.

Where to compare the rest

Cron monitoring is usually bought alongside uptime monitoring, and the pricing models in that market differ far more than the sticker prices do. We keep verified breakdowns of the major vendors, each read directly from the vendor's own price list: the Pulsetic pricing breakdown, the Uptrends credit rate card, StatusCake pricing and UptimeRobot pricing. If you would rather see them side by side, the uptime monitoring pricing comparison sorts every vendor by billing model, which is what actually decides your bill two years from now.