DE Start monitoring
Cronitor alternative · migration-friendly

Your cron jobs are not a separate invoice.

Cronitor charges $2 per monitor per month — and a cron job is a monitor, so a hundred nightly jobs is $200 before anyone has visited your website. Here a heartbeat is your job calling us: an inbound request, never metered. You pay for the checks we actually send, at €9 per million.

Start with €3 credit See how heartbeats work

€3 starting credit · no card · heartbeats on every plan

Line by line

What each invoice is actually made of.

—Cronitorup4
Cron jobs & heartbeats$2 each, per monthInbound pings — they cost nothing
Website / API monitors$2 each, per month€9 per million checks actually sent
Seats$5 per additional user, per monthUnlimited, on every plan
Fastest check interval30 seconds (5 s only on Enterprise, from $6,000 / year)10 seconds, on every plan
Branded status page$25 / monthIncluded, white-label
Private status page$50 / monthIncluded — IP allowlist or access link
Data residencyNot statedEU, German infrastructure, signed DPA
Worked examples

Three shapes of fleet, both invoices.

Their column is $2 per monitor plus $5 per extra seat; ours is €9 per million checks with a €3 monthly minimum. A heartbeat sends nothing outbound, so it contributes nothing to our meter. Full formula on the pricing page.

Cron only · 20 nightly jobs · 1 user
0 outbound checks — heartbeats are inbound€0.00
the €3 monthly minimum applies€3.00
Cronitor: 20 monitors × $2$40.00
total / month€3.00
Mixed · 40 monitors · every 60 s · 4 users
1,728,000 checks × €9 / million€15.55
our recommendation: Team, 100 monitors€9.00
Cronitor: 40 × $2 + 3 extra seats × $5$95.00
with the Team plan€9.00
The interval they gate · 20 monitors · every 10 s
5,184,000 checks — fits Team’s 20 M budget€9.00
Cronitor: 5-second checks are Enterprisefrom $500 / mo
with the Team plan€9.00

Public list prices, cronitor.io/pricing, July 2026. Enterprise shown as their stated “from $6,000/year”. If we got a number wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Migration

Swap the ping URLs, keep the crontab.

01

Create the heartbeats

One per job, with the cadence you expect and a grace window for the nights it runs long. Naming them after the crontab entry keeps the 4 a.m. alert readable.

02

Swap one URL per line

Replace the Cronitor ping URL with yours. Keep the && — the ping must only fire when the job exits cleanly, or a failed run looks healthy.

03

Bring the websites too

Paste your HTTP checks into the batch import. Now the jobs and the sites they feed are in one account, with one on-call rotation.

04

Point the alerts somewhere

Slack, email, PagerDuty or twelve more channels, grouped into alert plans. A missed backup climbs the same ladder as a down site.

FAQ

Switching questions, answered plainly

Heartbeats are really free?
The pings are, yes — and for a structural reason, not as a promotion. A heartbeat is an inbound HTTP request from your job to us; there is no outbound check for us to meter, and we do not bill inbound traffic. What is bounded is the count: 20 heartbeats on pay as you go, 50 on Team, 100 on Agency. Beyond that you move up a plan, not onto a per-job meter.
So what do I actually pay for cron monitoring?
On a cron-only account: the €3 monthly minimum, and nothing else, because the minimum is the only thing your usage has to reach. Twenty nightly jobs cost €3. The same twenty jobs are $40 at $2 each.
Is Cronitor worse?
It is a focused, well-built tool and its cron ergonomics are genuinely good. The disagreement is the unit: charging per monitor means a job that runs once a night costs the same as a website checked every thirty seconds, though one of them is a thousand times more work. Metering the checks we send prices the actual load.
Can I monitor websites here too, or is this cron-only?
Both, in one account and one bill. HTTP, keyword, TCP, DNS and ICMP ping checks all run on the same €9-per-million rate, with the same alert plans, on-call rotation, status pages and reports as the heartbeats.
What about the 5-second interval?
Cronitor sells 5-second checks on Enterprise, from $6,000 a year. Our floor is 10 seconds and it is on every plan, priced rather than gated: one single-region monitor at 10 seconds is 259,200 checks in a 30-day month — €2.33 metered, or inside Team’s 20-million budget.
Where does up4 run?
German infrastructure in the EU, from published egress IPs with an honest user agent, and a signed DPA as a download. Cronitor does not state a data-residency option on its pricing page.

Let the quiet jobs be quiet and cheap.

Start monitoring How heartbeats work

€3 starting credit · no card · heartbeats never metered