Healthchecks.io vs Cronitor Pricing: Which Costs Less at Your Job Count

Healthchecks.io is cheaper than Cronitor at every job count from 1 to 1,000, and there is no crossover point anywhere in that range. Healthchecks.io monitors 20 cron jobs free, 100 for $20 a month and 1,000 for $80, with no per user charge on any tier. Cronitor charges $2.00 per monitor per month plus $5.00 per user with no base fee, so 100 jobs and one user is $205 a month against Healthchecks.io's $20. The reason to pay Cronitor anyway is that its $2.00 monitor is not a cron-only monitor, and if you are only comparing cron prices you are comparing a specialist against a general monitoring platform.

That is an unusual result, so it is worth saying why we went looking for the opposite. A pure pay-as-you-go model normally beats a block model at low volume, because you pay for exactly what you use instead of buying a tier you have not filled. Cronitor bills per monitor, Healthchecks.io bills in fixed tiers, and the expectation is that Cronitor wins until some break-even job count and loses after it. We priced all thousand counts looking for that number. It does not exist.

Is Healthchecks.io cheaper than Cronitor?

Yes, at every count we tested, and the free tiers are why. Healthchecks.io monitors 20 jobs for nothing while Cronitor's free Hacker plan stops at 5. Across the whole stretch from job 6 to job 20, one vendor is still free and the other is already billing. By the time Healthchecks.io starts charging at job 21, its $20 tier holds 100 jobs, and Cronitor at 21 jobs with a single user is already $47 a month.

Monthly list prices in USD, read in September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. At 1,000 jobs the gap is 25 fold. Note that Cronitor ties rather than loses at five jobs and below, which is the closest it gets.

How much does Cronitor cost per monitor?

$2.00 per monitor per month, plus $5.00 per user per month, with no base fee and no minimum commitment. Cronitor publishes a worked example on its own pricing page: 20 monitors and 3 users comes to $55 a month. That example is useful for more than checking the arithmetic. It settles a question the page does not answer in words, which is whether the five free monitors carry over to the paid plan. They do not. Twenty monitors at $2.00 is $40, plus three users at $5.00 is $15, and $40 plus $15 is exactly the $55 Cronitor quotes. Every monitor is billed.

Above that sits an Enterprise tier from $6,000 a year with no published unit rates, and a set of add-ons: $25 a month per branded status page, $50 a month per private status page, $10 a month per 100,000 analytics events beyond the first 100,000, and $1 per 1,000 browser checks.

Does Healthchecks.io charge per user?

No. Its pricing page publishes no per user or per seat charge on any tier and states no team member limit at all. This is the single largest structural difference between the two products, and it is the one that scales worst for Cronitor. Adding people to a Cronitor account costs $5.00 each every month, forever, whether or not they ever log in.

At sixteen people the Cronitor seat line alone reaches $80 a month, which is the entire price of Healthchecks.io's plan for 1,000 jobs. If you are a four person team the seat charge is a rounding error. If scheduled jobs are owned across engineering, data and finance, it is most of the bill.

What is the $5 Supporter plan on Healthchecks.io?

It is a donation tier, and the vendor labels it as one. Supporter costs $5 a month and carries identical limits to the free Hobbyist plan: 20 monitored jobs and 100 log entries per job. You are not buying capacity, you are funding the project. That is an honest thing to publish and it catches people out in comparison tables, because a naive read of the price list makes it look like a paid tier that has been badly priced.

The real step up is Business at $20 a month for 100 jobs and 1,000 log entries, with 50 SMS credits and 20 phone call credits, then Business Plus at $80 for 1,000 jobs, 500 SMS and 100 calls. Paying annually costs $192 and $768 respectively, which is exactly 20 percent off both.

What does Cronitor do that Healthchecks.io does not?

Quite a lot, and this is the part a price table cannot show you. A Cronitor monitor is not restricted to cron jobs. The same $2.00 buys an uptime check on a website, a browser check that loads a page and runs a script, or a heartbeat. The price also includes web analytics for the first 100,000 events a month and a basic status page. Healthchecks.io does exactly one thing: it waits for scheduled jobs to check in and tells you when one does not. It will never tell you your website is down, because it never looks.

So the fair reading of the numbers above is narrower than it first appears. They show that Cronitor is an expensive way to buy cron monitoring on its own. They do not show that Cronitor is expensive, because almost nobody buys Cronitor purely for cron jobs. If you need uptime checks and scheduled job checks and a status page, the comparison you actually want is against a general monitoring tool, not against a cron specialist.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Healthchecks.io if scheduled jobs are the only thing you need watched, if your team is larger than a handful of people, or if your job count is high. At 1,000 jobs for $80 a month with unlimited seats, nothing else in this category is close, and its free tier of 20 jobs is genuinely usable rather than a trial.

Pick Cronitor if you are going to use the rest of the platform. If it replaces a separate uptime monitoring subscription and a separate analytics tool, the per monitor price stops looking like a premium and starts looking like a bundle. Just count the seats before you commit, because that line grows with your org chart rather than with your infrastructure.

And check whether you are about to buy two products. The reason this comparison exists at all is that cron monitoring is usually bought separately from uptime monitoring, and teams end up holding both. A nightly database backup, a data sync that moves records between your apps and your warehouse, a weekly report build and the scheduled job that chases overdue invoices by email and SMS all need the dead man switch pattern, while the API those jobs write to needs ordinary polling. Those are different questions about the same system, and paying two vendors to answer them is common but not required. We priced six cron job monitoring vendors side by side, including Dead Man's Snitch, which turns out to be the cheapest published option between four and three hundred jobs and is left out of almost every comparison.

How we checked these prices

Every figure here was read in September 2026 from cronitor.io/pricing and healthchecks.io/pricing in US dollars, and all the arithmetic is ours and reproducible from the rates quoted. Prices are monthly list for both vendors, so neither is quoted in a billing mode the other is not. The model was validated against Cronitor's own published example of 20 monitors and 3 users at $55 a month before any of this was written, and Healthchecks.io's annual prices reproduce as exactly 20 percent off its monthly tiers, which confirms the tier reading independently.

Two things are deliberately not asserted. Cronitor publishes no Enterprise unit rates, only a $6,000 a year floor, so we do not estimate them. Healthchecks.io publishes no team member limit, so we say it does not meter users rather than inventing an allowance it might enforce later.

The single vendor breakdowns go deeper than this head to head does: the full Cronitor pricing breakdown works through every add-on rate, and the Healthchecks.io pricing breakdown covers the log retention and credit limits that decide which tier you actually need. If what you want is one tool that treats a scheduled job and an HTTP endpoint as the same kind of monitor from one pool, that is how cron and heartbeat monitoring works here, and the plans are on the pricing page.