Healthchecks.io

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Introduction

Healthchecks.io notifies you when nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs and scheduled tasks do not run on time. You generate a unique ping URL for each job, make the job send an HTTP request to it every time it runs, and Healthchecks alerts you when a ping does not arrive on schedule. It also accepts email pings.

Each check has a configurable period and grace time, and checks can be named and tagged. The service includes a web dashboard, an API, 25+ notification integrations, monthly email reports, WebAuthn two-factor authentication and team features such as projects, team members and read-only access. It is written in Python and Django.

Silent failures are among the hardest bugs to test for: a job that never runs throws no error. Dead-man’s-switch monitoring is the simplest safety net, and it is worth adding to every scheduled task in a release checklist.

The source code is at healthchecks/healthchecks on GitHub under the BSD-3-Clause licence, with about 10,500 stars; the most recent commit was on 10 November 2026.

Features

1. Ping URLs: HTTP or email pings.
2. Period and grace time: Flexible schedules.
3. 25+ integrations: Alerts anywhere.
4. API: Automate check management.
5. Team features: Projects and read-only access.
6. Self-hosting: Django app you can run.

Pros

1. Free hosted tier: 20 cron jobs free.
2. Free to use: Open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 10 November 2026.
4. Community: About 10,500 GitHub stars.

Cons

1. Narrow scope: Cron and heartbeat monitoring only.

Usage and Links (Example)

1. Create a check on Healthchecks.io (or your self-hosted instance) and copy its unique ping URL.
2. At the end of the job, send an HTTP request to that URL (for example with curl).
3. Set the period and grace time, and choose integrations for alerts.

Resources:

• Healthchecks.io website
• GitHub repository

Pricing

Healthchecks.io lets you monitor 20 cron jobs for free with no credit card; paid hosted plans add more checks, and self-hosting the BSD-3-Clause code is free.

Recommended for?

1. Anyone running cron jobs, backups or scheduled tasks.

Conclusion

Healthchecks.io is a simple, trusted, open-source dead-man’s switch.

Add it to every scheduled job.

On CheckOps, Healthchecks.io is filed under the Production monitoring & observability stage. Related tools listed here include Datadog, Better Stack, Uptime Kuma, UptimeRobot, Sentry and Checkly. Before standardising on one, compare recent maintenance activity, the pricing model as your usage grows, and the integrations you rely on today. Information on this page was verified against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.