Healthchecks.io

What Healthchecks.io does

Healthchecks.io is a cron job and scheduled task monitoring service operated as a one-person bootstrapped company by Pēteris Caune under the Latvian legal entity SIA Monkey See Monkey Do. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Riga, Latvia, with infrastructure hosted on Hetzner bare metal servers in Germany, the platform uses a dead man's switch technique to detect silent failures of background processes: customers configure scheduled jobs to send HTTP pings to unique URLs, and Healthchecks.io alerts them when expected pings are missed. It serves a horizontal developer/DevOps audience — individual developers, sysadmins, SMBs, and small teams — monitoring backups, cron jobs, data pipelines, SSL renewals, IoT gateways, and similar unattended tasks. The product line also includes a BSD-licensed open-source codebase on GitHub that allows enterprises to self-host.

The technical stack pairs a Django (Python) web application with a proprietary Go-based high-throughput ping handler that batches writes via the PostgreSQL COPY protocol, sustaining 11,000+ requests per second during cron-scheduling traffic spikes. Production infrastructure runs on Hetzner EX130-S bare-metal servers in Germany with hot-standby PostgreSQL, self-hosted Maddy SMTP for transactional email, self-hosted Versity S3 Gateway (Btrfs on RAID-1 NVMe) for ping-body object storage, HAProxy 3.2 with HTTP/3, and NGINX. The product ships with 30+ native notification integrations (Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call, Prometheus, Gotify, ntfy, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, phone), a Management API v3 with read-write/read-only keys, public status badges, cron and systemd OnCalendar schedule support, and HTTP-ping keyword classification.

The business model is fully self-serve, product-led growth with no sales motion. The free tier offers 20 checks with no credit card required; paid tiers (Supporter at $5/mo, Business at $20/mo, Business Plus at $60/mo) add SMS/phone notifications and higher check counts. In February 2026 the company removed team-size caps across all tiers, broadening team-level adoption. The codebase is BSD-licensed open source with self-hosting documentation, providing a separate distribution channel for regulated/enterprise buyers. Healthchecks.io is bootstrapped with no external funding, no institutional investors, and no public listing; revenue is not disclosed.

Name

Healthchecks.io

Legal name

SIA Monkey See Monkey Do

Website

https://healthchecks.io

Company type

Private

Founded year

2015

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Healthchecks.io is a bootstrapped, one-person SaaS that monitors cron jobs and scheduled tasks via a dead man's switch technique, alerting developers, sysadmins, and SMB teams when background jobs fail to run on time.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Riga

HQ country

Latvia

HQ region

Europe

Offices2 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Infrastructure, Technology or R&D, Operations, Personnel

Revenue model

1. Subscription Plans: Monthly subscription tiers with increasing check limits and features. Free tier offers 20 checks. Paid tiers unlock more checks, SMS/phone notifications, and additional features. Self-service ordering via website billing page.
2. SMS and Phone Notifications: SMS and phone call notifications available on paid plans only. Twilio integration for SMS delivery. After May 2026 SMS pumping attack, free accounts have SMS limit set to 0.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Healthchecks.io is a SaaS monitoring service that alerts users when scheduled background jobs (cron jobs, systemd timers, scheduled tasks) fail to run on time. It uses a dead man's switch technique: each monitored job is assigned a unique ping URL that must receive periodic HTTP requests, and the service notifies users via 30+ channels when expected pings are missed.

Product overview

Healthchecks.io is a single unified cron job monitoring service built around the dead man's switch technique. The core Healthchecks.io product consists of the hosted SaaS service (healthchecks.io) and its underlying open-source project (BSD-licensed on GitHub). The platform monitors cron jobs, daemon processes, and scheduled tasks by receiving periodic HTTP pings and alerting users when expected pings are missed. Features include configurable Period and Grace Time parameters, Cron expression support, public status badges, a live-updating dashboard, and detailed event logging with ping request body capture (up to 100KB).

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Hosted Healthchecks.io Service Cloud-hosted SaaS cron job monitoring service using the dead man's switch technique. Users configure background jobs to send periodic HTTP pings to unique URLs; the service alerts users when expected pings are missed. Targeted at developers, DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and small teams running unattended scheduled tasks.
• Healthchecks Open Source Project BSD-licensed open-source cron monitoring software available on GitHub. Enables self-hosting for teams needing custom features, GDPR/data-residency compliance, or wanting to run monitoring in-house on their own infrastructure.

Quantifiable outcome

• Free plan: 20 checks. Paid at $20/mo: 100 checks.

Named customers4 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration27 records

Feature6 records

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Broad incumbents

• Sentry: Sentry's Cron Monitoring feature applies the dead-man's-switch pattern inside its broader error and performance monitoring platform, directly competing with Healthchecks for developer mindshare.
• Datadog: Datadog is a full-stack observability platform with synthetic monitoring, scheduled-task checks, and APM; its bundled platform features make it a natural alternative for customers already paying for Datadog.
• UptimeRobot: UptimeRobot is an established incumbent in uptime/HTTP monitoring that frequently extends into cron/scheduled-task monitoring for SMB and enterprise customers, giving it wider distribution in overlapping use cases.

Emerging players

• Checkly: Checkly provides API and browser synthetic monitoring that overlaps with scheduled-job monitoring for engineering teams, increasingly competing for the same DevOps budgets.
• Instatus: Instatus focuses on status pages and incident communication with adjacent monitoring features; it serves similar dev/SMB customers with a comparable self-serve PLG motion.

Direct peers

• Dead Man's Snitch: Dead Man's Snitch is one of the pioneering and most-recognized dedicated cron monitoring services, applying the same dead-man's-switch technique and targeting developers and ops teams with very similar feature sets.
• Cronitor: Cronitor is a direct competitor in the cron job / scheduled-task monitoring category, offering pings-on-dead-man's-switch, integrations, and PLG pricing very similar to Healthchecks.io, and is explicitly called out by the company as a comparison page.
• Better Stack (Better Uptime): Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, on-call scheduling, status pages, and now scheduled-job monitoring, competing head-to-head for the same DevOps buyer that Healthchecks targets.
• Oh Dear: Oh Dear is a small-team SaaS offering uptime, broken-link, SSL-certificate, and cron monitoring aimed at indie developers and SMBs — a near-twin in terms of self-serve PLG motion and developer audience.
• Cronhub: Cronhub focuses narrowly on scheduled-task and cron monitoring with similar ping-based alerts and integrations, addressing the same developer/DevOps persona.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks7 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xfosstodon.org/@healthchecks_io
• GitHubgithub.com/healthchecks/healthchecks

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Healthchecks.io