Cron job monitoring pricing: cost per job at Cronitor, Healthchecks and Sentry
Six vendors meter the same job in five different units. Put your job count and team size in and the calculator prices all of them side by side at monthly list.
Cron job monitoring cost calculator
LiveMonthly list prices in USD read in September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. Only the cron monitoring line is counted. Sentry's figure excludes the Sentry plan it sits on, and Cronitor is the only vendor here that meters people as well as jobs.
How much does cron job monitoring cost?
Cron job monitoring is sold three different ways, and the spread between them is wider than in any other monitoring category. Cronitor charges $2.00 per monitor per month plus $5.00 per user with no base fee, Healthchecks.io sells fixed tiers at $20 a month for 100 jobs and $80 for 1,000, and Dead Man's Snitch sells 100 jobs for $19. At 100 jobs those models produce $205, $20 and $19 a month for the identical job count, a spread of more than ten to one, and at 1,000 jobs Cronitor reaches $2,005 against Healthchecks.io at $80. Nothing about the checking itself differs enough to explain a 25 fold gap, so the billing unit is the whole decision.
The reason the gap is so large is that nobody in this market sells the same unit. Cronitor sells monitors and people. Healthchecks.io and Dead Man's Snitch sell capacity in fixed blocks. Sentry sells one monitor at a time on top of a subscription you already hold. Better Stack sells heartbeats ten at a time. Price any two of them at a single job count and the comparison looks arbitrary, because the number you get depends far more on which unit you happened to land on than on how much monitoring you are doing.
At 100 jobs, one user
Monthly list, cron monitoring line only. A 10.8 fold spread for an identical job count.
Every vendor priced at seven job counts
Monthly list price in USD for a single user, counting only the cron monitoring line. Read across a row to see how a vendor scales, and down a column to see how much the billing unit matters at a fixed job count.
| Vendor | 3 jobs | 10 jobs | 20 jobs | 50 jobs | 100 jobs | 300 jobs | 1,000 jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cronitor | $0.00 | $25.00 | $45.00 | $105.00 | $205.00 | $605.00 | $2,005.00 |
| Healthchecks.io | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 | $80.00 | $80.00 |
| Dead Man's Snitch | $5.00 | $19.00 | $19.00 | $19.00 | $19.00 | $49.00 | No plan |
| Sentry crons | $1.56 | $7.02 | $14.82 | $38.22 | $77.22 | $233.22 | $779.22 |
| Better Stack heartbeats | $0.00 | $0.00 | $20.00 | $80.00 | $180.00 | $580.00 | $1,980.00 |
| Uptimehub | $12.00 | $12.00 | $12.00 | $39.00 | $39.00 | $99.00 | No plan |
Cronitor is free up to 5 monitors on its Hacker plan, which carries email and Slack alerts only. Dead Man's Snitch publishes no plan above 300 snitches and Uptimehub none above 400 monitors, so both read "No plan" at 1,000 rather than being extrapolated.
Cronitor never becomes cheaper than Healthchecks.io, at any job count
Most pricing comparisons end with a crossover: vendor A wins below some number of units and vendor B wins above it. That is what we expected to find here, because Cronitor bills per unit and Healthchecks.io bills in blocks, and a per unit model normally wins at small volumes. It does not happen. We priced every job count from 1 to 1,000 and Cronitor is cheaper at none of them.
The reason is that the two free tiers point in opposite directions. Healthchecks.io monitors 20 jobs for nothing, while Cronitor's free plan stops at 5. So across the whole range from 6 to 20 jobs, Healthchecks.io is free and Cronitor is already charging. By the time Healthchecks.io starts charging at all, at job 21, its $20 tier holds 100 jobs, and Cronitor at 21 jobs with one user is $47. The gap only widens from there.
For this to be a fair statement it has to be scoped properly, so here is the scope. It compares monthly list prices, a single user, and pure cron job monitoring. Change any of those and the answer can change. Cronitor's $2.00 monitor is not a cron-only monitor: the same $2.00 buys an uptime check, a browser check or a heartbeat, and the price includes web analytics for the first 100,000 events plus a status page. Healthchecks.io does one job. If you need the other things Cronitor does, comparing the two on cron jobs alone is the wrong comparison, and you should price Cronitor against a general monitoring tool instead.
Where the money goes at 50 jobs
| Team size | Cronitor | Healthchecks |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | $105.00 | $20.00 |
| 3 people | $115.00 | $20.00 |
| 5 people | $125.00 | $20.00 |
| 10 people | $150.00 | $20.00 |
| 16 people | $180.00 | $20.00 |
| 20 people | $200.00 | $20.00 |
Cronitor is the only vendor on this page that meters people. At 16 users the seat line alone reaches $80, which is the entire price of Healthchecks.io's 1,000 job plan.
At Dead Man's Snitch the fourth job costs $14 and the next ninety-six are free
Dead Man's Snitch publishes four plans: 1 snitch free, 3 snitches for $5 a month, 100 for $19 and 300 for $49. The step from the second plan to the third is the one worth planning around, because it is enormous in percentage terms and then completely flat for a very long stretch.
| Job number | Plan you land on | Monthly cost | What that job cost you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job 1 | Lone Snitch | $0.00 | Nothing |
| Job 2 | Little Birdy | $5.00 | $5.00 |
| Job 3 | Little Birdy | $5.00 | Nothing |
| Job 4 | Private Eye | $19.00 | $14.00 |
| Job 5 to 100 | Private Eye | $19.00 | Nothing |
| Job 101 | Surveillance Van | $49.00 | $30.00 |
| Job 102 to 300 | Surveillance Van | $49.00 | Nothing |
| Job 301 | None published | No plan | You have to move vendor |
Two practical consequences fall out of that table. If you are on Little Birdy and about to add a fourth job, your bill nearly quadruples for one job, so it is worth checking whether you are about to add one job or eventually twenty. And if you are anywhere between 4 and 100 jobs, additional jobs are genuinely free, which makes Dead Man's Snitch the cheapest published option in that entire range and the one most comparison articles leave out. The catch arrives at job 301, where the price list simply ends and you have to migrate.
Two vendors charge exactly $2.00 a job by completely different mechanisms
Cronitor prices a monitor at $2.00 a month, singly, pay as you go. Better Stack does not sell heartbeats singly at all: it sells them in blocks of ten for $20 a month on top of a free base plan that already includes ten. Those are structurally unrelated pricing decisions, and they land on the identical marginal rate of $2.00 per job per month.
A clean coincidence like that is usually a parsing error, so we checked it against a second consequence rather than accepting it. If both really charge $2.00 a job at the margin, their totals should converge as the free allowances stop mattering. At 1,000 jobs Cronitor is $2,005 and Better Stack is $1,980, a difference of 1.3%, which is exactly the residue of Cronitor's $5 user charge against Better Stack's ten free heartbeats. The rate holds.
The difference that survives is granularity. Because Better Stack rounds up to the next block of ten, a team with 11 heartbeats pays for 20 and a team with 21 pays for 30. Cronitor bills the exact count. At job counts that sit just above a multiple of ten, Better Stack is paying for up to nine monitors it is not using.
The same rate, reached differently
| Jobs | Cronitor | Better Stack | Paid, unused |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | $27.00 | $20.00 | 9 heartbeats |
| 20 | $45.00 | $20.00 | None |
| 21 | $47.00 | $40.00 | 9 heartbeats |
| 100 | $205.00 | $180.00 | None |
| 1,000 | $2,005.00 | $1,980.00 | None |
Cronitor figures assume one user. Better Stack's free base plan includes 10 heartbeats, 10 monitors and 1 status page.
What each vendor actually sells you
Before comparing any two prices here, check that they are prices for the same thing. This is the column that decides your bill.
| Vendor | Billing unit | Free allowance | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cronitor | $2.00 per monitor per month, plus $5.00 per user | 5 monitors, 1 user | Pure pay as you go with no base fee. Users are metered separately from monitors. |
| Healthchecks.io | Fixed tier: $20 for 100 jobs, $80 for 1,000 | 20 jobs | Cron only. The pricing page publishes no per user charge at all. |
| Dead Man's Snitch | Fixed tier: $19 for 100, $49 for 300 | 1 snitch | Cron only, and capped. Nothing is published above 300 snitches. |
| Sentry crons | $0.78 per cron monitor per month | 1 cron monitor on every plan | Sits on top of a Sentry plan you are already paying for. The single included monitor never increases. |
| Better Stack | $20 per additional block of 10 heartbeats | 10 heartbeats | Sold in blocks of ten rather than singly, so nine spare heartbeats are normal. |
| Uptimehub | Flat plan: 20, 100 or 400 monitors | None, plans start at $12 | A cron job and a website are the same kind of monitor, drawn from one pool. Seats are not metered. |
What one monitored job costs per month
| Vendor | At 100 jobs | At 1,000 jobs | How the rate behaves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthchecks.io | $0.20 | $0.08 | Falls by 60% because the top tier holds ten times the jobs for four times the price. |
| Dead Man's Snitch | $0.19 | No plan | Cheapest published rate anywhere on this page, but it stops at 300 snitches. |
| Uptimehub | $0.39 | No plan | One pool covers cron jobs, uptime, SSL and the status page. |
| Sentry crons | $0.77 | $0.78 | Essentially flat. Only one monitor is ever free, so volume changes nothing. |
| Better Stack heartbeats | $1.80 | $1.98 | Rises with scale, because the free ten stop mattering. |
| Cronitor | $2.05 | $2.01 | Flat by design. There is no published volume discount below Enterprise. |
Healthchecks.io is the only vendor here whose per job rate falls materially with scale, because its top tier holds ten times the jobs for four times the price.
Which one is right for you, including when it is not us
Healthchecks.io
The cheapest way to monitor a lot of cron jobs and nothing else. If you have 1,000 scheduled jobs and already monitor uptime somewhere else, $80 a month is not beatable on this page. It also charges nothing per seat, so team size is free.
Dead Man's Snitch
The cheapest published price between 4 and 300 jobs, at $19 or $49 a month. Pick it if your job count is stable and well under 300. Above that its price list ends and you will be migrating.
Cronitor
Worth its premium only if you use the rest of it. The $2.00 monitor also buys uptime checks, browser checks, a status page and 100,000 analytics events. Priced purely as cron monitoring it loses to everything here, and its per seat charge compounds that on a big team.
Sentry crons
Sensible if you already pay Sentry and have a handful of jobs. At $0.78 a monitor, ten jobs is $7.02 a month and the errors land next to your existing traces. Every plan includes exactly one cron monitor, so the second job always costs money no matter which tier you are on.
Better Stack
The free base plan is genuinely useful: 10 heartbeats, 10 monitors and a status page for nothing. It gets expensive quickly after that, because heartbeats come in blocks of ten at $20.
Uptimehub
Right when your cron jobs are not the only thing you need watched. A cron job, an HTTP endpoint, an SSL certificate and a domain expiry are all just monitors from one pool, the status page is on every plan, and seats are not metered. 100 monitors in any mix is $39 a month.
The honest summary is that if cron monitoring is genuinely all you need, a specialist will be cheaper than us, and Healthchecks.io at $0.08 a job is cheaper than anything we sell. Where a single pool wins is when you stop counting subscriptions one at a time. A team running 40 scheduled jobs, 30 endpoints, a dozen certificates and a public status page is otherwise buying two or three products, and the second subscription usually costs more than the difference we are discussing here. You can see the full cron and heartbeat monitoring feature and how it shares a pool with everything else, or go straight to plans and pricing.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure was read in September 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page in USD: cronitor.io/pricing, healthchecks.io/pricing, deadmanssnitch.com/plans and sentry.io/pricing. Better Stack's heartbeat add-on rate comes from our own earlier verification of betterstack.com. The arithmetic is ours and it is reproducible from the rates above.
The cost model was validated before any of this was written, against a worked example the vendor publishes itself. Cronitor's pricing page states that 20 monitors and 3 users comes to $55 a month. Our model returns 20 at $2.00 plus 3 at $5.00, which is $55.00 exactly, and that also settles a question the page does not answer directly: on the paid plan every monitor is billed, not only the ones above the free tier's five. Healthchecks.io's published annual prices of $192 and $768 reproduce as exactly 20% off its $20 and $80 monthly tiers, which confirms the tier reading independently.
One scoping decision is worth stating openly, because it is the most common way comparisons like this go wrong. Sentry's pricing page shows Team at $26 and Business at $80 when annual billing is selected, and $29 and $89 when monthly is. Both are correct, and both are the same 10% annual discount. Every number on this page is monthly list for every vendor, so that no vendor is ever compared in one billing mode against a rival quoted in another.
Three things are deliberately not asserted here. Cronitor publishes no Enterprise unit rates, only a floor of $6,000 a year. Healthchecks.io publishes no team member limit on any tier, so we say it does not meter users rather than claiming a specific allowance. And Dead Man's Snitch publishes nothing above 300 snitches, so the 1,000 job column reads "No plan" instead of an extrapolation we would have invented.
Cron job monitoring pricing questions
How much does cron job monitoring cost?
Between nothing and about $2.00 per job per month, depending entirely on the billing unit. Healthchecks.io monitors 20 jobs free and 100 for $20 a month, Dead Man's Snitch covers 100 for $19, and Cronitor charges $2.00 per monitor plus $5.00 per user with no free allowance on its paid plan. At 100 jobs that is $20, $19 and $205 a month for the same work.
What is the cheapest cron job monitoring service?
Dead Man's Snitch at $19 a month is the cheapest published price for 100 cron jobs, narrowly beating Healthchecks.io at $20. Below 20 jobs Healthchecks.io is free and therefore cheapest. Above 300 jobs Dead Man's Snitch publishes no plan at all, and Healthchecks.io becomes the cheapest again at $80 for 1,000 jobs.
Is Healthchecks.io cheaper than Cronitor?
Yes, at every job count from 1 to 1,000. We checked all thousand and there is no crossover point. Cronitor ties at five jobs or fewer, where both are free, and costs more everywhere above that. At 100 jobs it is $205 against $20, and at 1,000 jobs $2,005 against $80. Cronitor does more than cron monitoring, which is the real reason to pay it.
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. Cronitor publishes its own worked example: 20 monitors and 3 users comes to $55 a month. The free Hacker plan holds 5 monitors with email and Slack alerts only. Enterprise starts at $6,000 a year with no published unit rates.
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. That is the single biggest structural difference from Cronitor, which meters users at $5.00 each. On a team of ten, Cronitor adds $50 a month before a single monitor is counted and Healthchecks.io adds nothing.
How many cron jobs does Dead Man's Snitch include?
One on the free Lone Snitch plan, 3 on Little Birdy at $5 a month, 100 on Private Eye at $19 and 300 on Surveillance Van at $49. The jump from 3 to 100 is the one to notice: the fourth job forces a $14 upgrade, and jobs five through one hundred then cost nothing more.
How much does Sentry charge for cron monitoring?
$0.78 per cron monitor per month beyond the one included monitor. Every Sentry plan includes exactly one cron monitor, the free Developer plan and the Business plan alike, so upgrading your Sentry tier never buys a second one. At 50 jobs the cron line is $38.22 a month on top of whatever your Sentry plan already costs.
Can I monitor cron jobs and websites in one tool?
Yes, and it is usually cheaper than running two subscriptions. Healthchecks.io and Dead Man's Snitch are cron only and will not tell you your site is down. Uptimehub treats a cron job, an HTTP endpoint, an SSL certificate and a domain expiry as the same kind of monitor drawn from one pool, so 100 monitors covers any mix of them for $39 a month.
What happens if a cron job stops running?
Nothing, which is the entire problem. A job that fails loudly writes an error you can alert on, but a job that stops being scheduled produces no output at all. Cron monitoring inverts the logic: the job pings a URL when it finishes, and the monitor alerts when the expected ping does not arrive inside its grace period.
Do I need cron monitoring if I already have uptime monitoring?
Yes, because they watch opposite things. Uptime monitoring polls a service and asks whether it answers. Cron monitoring waits for a job to report in and asks why it did not. A nightly backup, an invoice run or a data export can stop for weeks without moving any uptime metric, because the website it belongs to stays perfectly available the whole time.
One pool for scheduled jobs and everything else you watch
A cron job, an API endpoint, an SSL certificate and a domain renewal are the same kind of monitor here, drawn from one count, with a branded status page on every plan and no charge per seat. 20 monitors is $12 a month, 100 is $39.
Related breakdowns
Cronitor pricing breakdown
The full $2 per monitor and $5 per user model, including what the status page and analytics add-ons cost.
Healthchecks.io pricing breakdown
Why the $5 Supporter plan has identical limits to the free one, and what $0.08 a job really buys.
Sentry cron monitoring pricing
Every Sentry plan includes exactly one cron monitor, free and paid alike. Here is what the second one costs.
Cron and heartbeat monitoring
How a dead man switch catches the job that stops being scheduled instead of failing loudly.
Better Stack pricing breakdown
A free base plan and roughly twenty separately priced add-ons, heartbeats among them.
Uptime monitoring pricing compared
The wider market priced side by side, where the billing model matters more than the headline number.