Introducing WatchCron: cron job monitoring that tells you what actually broke

Vitalii Holben · Mar 22, 2026 · 3 min read

If you run cron jobs, you've been there: a job quietly stops working and nobody notices for days. Cron doesn't send alerts. It just fails silently. And when your client asks why their backups haven't been running since Tuesday — what do you say?

That's why I built WatchCron. The idea is simple: your cron job pings a URL when it finishes. If the ping doesn't arrive on time, you get an alert.

dashbord watchcron

Setup takes almost no time. All you need to do is create a check, get a URL, and add one line to your cron:

0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://watchcron.com/ping/abc123

That's it. If the job ran, we know. If it didn't, you know, and you get notified right away through whatever channel works for you.

There are already cron monitors on the market, but I tried to offer more for less money. New features will keep coming regardless of which plan you're on.

Alerts

The service has popular notification channels built in. Alerts go to Slack, Telegram, Discord, and webhooks. You pick what works for you or your team. Alerts fire both on failure and on recovery, so you know when things are back to normal too.

alerts watchcron

Schedules and grace periods

You can set an expected schedule (every hour, every day at 2am, every Monday) and define a grace period. If your backup usually takes 20 minutes, set a 30 minute grace period to avoid false alarms. We support standard cron expressions and human-readable intervals.

Create new check in watchcron service

Works with everything

Linux cron, systemd timers, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions, Laravel scheduler, Django management commands, Node.js scripts. If it can make an HTTP request, it works with WatchCron. No SDK, no agents. It's just a URL.

REST API

Everything you can do in the dashboard, you can do through the API. Create checks, list them, pause them, pull ping history. Useful if you're provisioning infrastructure with Terraform or Ansible and want monitoring to follow automatically.

api for watchcron

Pricing

Free tier gives you 5 checks with unlimited pings. Enough to monitor your most important jobs and see if WatchCron is right for you.

Starter is $9/month for 25 checks, 2 team members, 3 projects, and all notification channels including Slack and Telegram.

Pro is $29/month for 100 checks, 5 team members, 10 projects, and extended ping history.

Business is $79/month for 500 checks, 20 team members, and unlimited projects.

All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial and roughly 20% off when you pay annually.

pricing

Why another cron monitor?

I tried to give more for a lower price without cutting corners on quality. Starter at $9/month covers 25 checks, which is enough for most indie developers and small projects. And if your infrastructure grows, Pro and Business scale with it. No surprises.

What's next

The core product is ready. Over the coming weeks I'll be adding on-call rotation, more integrations, and a public status badge for your README. If something is missing, let me know.