What is Dead Man's Snitch used for?

Dead Man's Snitch is a cron job monitoring service that alerts you when a scheduled task, backup or periodic process fails to check in on time. It is a good fit for confirming nightly backups ran and catching missed monthly email jobs.

Is Dead Man's Snitch free?

Yes. Dead Man's Snitch has a free plan, and paid plans start at $5 per month. A free trial is also available.

Is Dead Man's Snitch open source?

No. Dead Man's Snitch is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch include Healthchecks, Uptime Kuma and OneUptime.

What are some alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch?

Dead Man's Snitch competes with Cronitor and Better Stack. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Dead Man's Snitch alternatives.

Dead Man's Snitch: features, pricing and alternatives

About Dead Man's Snitch

Dead Man's Snitch is a commercial monitoring service that watches periodic processes and tells you when something does not happen. It is aimed at jobs such as daily backups, monthly emails and hourly cron tasks, whose failures are otherwise easy to miss.

Each monitored job, called a snitch, gets a unique URL. After the job finishes, it makes a request to that URL with curl or a similar tool, and if the check-in does not arrive within the chosen interval, the service sends an alert to the people configured for that job. It works with cron, the Heroku Scheduler and any other scheduled task, and a mobile app is offered for push notifications. Dead Man's Snitch is proprietary and vendor-hosted, with a free trial, a plans page, documentation, an API and a status page.

Key features

Unique check-in URL for each job
Alerts when a scheduled job misses its interval
Works with cron and Heroku Scheduler
Per-job alert recipients
Mobile app for push notifications
API for managing snitches

Good fit for

→Confirming nightly backups ran
→Catching missed monthly email jobs

Tags: cron-monitoring; heartbeat-monitoring; alerting; scheduled-jobs; backups; heroku; saas

Dead Man's Snitch: questions and answers

What is Dead Man's Snitch used for?: Dead Man's Snitch is a cron job monitoring service that alerts you when a scheduled task, backup or periodic process fails to check in on time. It is a good fit for confirming nightly backups ran and catching missed monthly email jobs.
Is Dead Man's Snitch free?: Yes. Dead Man's Snitch has a free plan, and paid plans start at $5 per month. A free trial is also available.
Is Dead Man's Snitch open source?: No. Dead Man's Snitch is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch include Healthchecks, Uptime Kuma and OneUptime.
What are some alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch?: Dead Man's Snitch competes with Cronitor and Better Stack. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Dead Man's Snitch alternatives.