About CronAlert

1. Why We Built CronAlert

We're developers. Between side projects, client sites, internal tools, and production APIs, we had dozens of URLs that needed monitoring. The kind of thing where you just want to know: "is this thing still responding with a 200?"

So we looked at what was out there. UptimeRobot wanted $8/month for 50 monitors. Better Stack started at $29/month and quickly climbed past $50 for anything useful. Cronitor charged $2 per monitor. Pingdom dropped their free tier entirely and started at $15/month for just 10 monitors.

We were spending $50-200/month across different tools just to periodically hit a URL and check if we got a 200 back. The actual compute cost of making an HTTP request from a Cloudflare Worker is a fraction of a cent. The math didn't add up.

So we built CronAlert. Not because the world needed another monitoring tool, but because it needed one that was priced honestly.

2. How We Keep Costs Low

CronAlert runs entirely on Cloudflare's edge infrastructure. No EC2 instances. No managed databases with monthly minimums. No Kubernetes clusters burning money overnight.

• Cloudflare Workers execute every URL check. Workers run on Cloudflare's global network across 300+ cities. You pay per request, and the per-request cost is negligible. No idle servers.
• Cloudflare D1 is our database. It's SQLite at the edge, billed by rows read and written. No fixed monthly database cost.
• Cloudflare Pages serves the app. The dashboard is server-rendered with Astro and HTMX -- no heavy JavaScript framework, no expensive client-side infrastructure.
• Cron Triggers handle scheduling. Cloudflare runs our checks on a schedule without us maintaining cron servers or job queues.

This architecture means our costs scale linearly with usage, and the per-unit cost is extremely low. We pass those savings directly to you. That's how we offer 25 free monitors with no catch, and why our paid plans start at $5/month for 100 monitors instead of $50+.

3. Price Comparison

Here's how CronAlert stacks up against the most popular monitoring tools. All prices reflect publicly listed pricing as of early 2026.

We're not claiming the other tools are bad. Many of them are excellent and offer features we don't (yet). But if what you need is reliable uptime monitoring with alerts, you shouldn't have to pay enterprise prices for it.

4. What's Included

Every CronAlert account -- including the free tier -- gets the core monitoring experience without artificial limitations:

• HTTP(S) monitoring -- we curl your URLs on a schedule and check the response.
• SSL certificate monitoring -- get alerted before your certificates expire.
• Multi-channel alerts -- email, Slack, Discord, and webhooks on every plan. Teams, Telegram, and PagerDuty on paid plans.
• Status pages -- public status pages for your services, included on every plan.
• REST API -- programmatic access to manage monitors and retrieve check results.
• Incident tracking -- automatic incident creation and resolution when monitors go down and recover.
• Team support -- invite team members on Team and Business plans. No per-seat charges.

Paid plans unlock higher monitor limits, faster check intervals (1-minute), longer log retention, keyword monitoring, and maintenance windows. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.

5. Get Started

CronAlert is free to start and takes about 30 seconds to set up your first monitor. No credit card required. No trial period. The free tier is free forever.

If you have questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, reach out at [email protected]. We read every message.