PostDeploy as a Cronitor alternative
PostDeploy gives cron jobs and uptime monitors separate allowances on one flat, project-oriented plan, with error tracking and analytics on the same login. Cronitor's job telemetry goes deeper, and its pricing is a per-monitor meter. Pick PostDeploy for a predictable bill that covers the whole project.
What Cronitor sells
Cronitor sells a developer monitoring suite covering cron jobs, uptime checks, heartbeats, status pages and cookie-free analytics, to teams that want backend jobs and frontend health in one tool.
Side by side, before you commit
Their published free tier against what you get on PostDeploy, because that is where the decision starts.
| Cronitor | PostDeploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime and API monitors | 5 shared with jobs | 20, own allowance |
| Cron and heartbeat jobs | Shared with the 5 above | 20, own allowance |
| Check interval floor | 5 minutes | 5 minutes |
| Cron and heartbeat monitoring | Yes, free | Yes, free |
| Seats on the entry plan | 1 | 1 |
| Pricing model past free | Metered: $2 / monitor, $5 / user | Flat plan, $5 a month |
| Job execution telemetry | Start, finish, duration, assertions | Success ping and late detection |
| Analytics and error tracking | Shipped today (RUM, JS errors) | Shipped today (Measure, Observe) |
Why people look for a Cronitor alternative
The free tier runs out at five monitors. Five objects covers one API and four cron jobs, and a real project usually has more than that before it has revenue.
Past the free tier there is no next plan, only a meter: $2 per monitor per month plus $5 per dashboard user. Fifteen monitors and one seat is $35 a month, and the bill grows in a straight line with no plateau until Enterprise starts at $6,000 a year.
Status pages are unbundled. One basic page is included; a branded page is $25 a month and a private one is $50.
What Cronitor does well
Cronitor's job telemetry is deeper: duration and error-rate assertions, schedule tolerances, grace periods, crontab auto-discovery, eleven check regions and SMS escalation, none of which PostDeploy has.
Where PostDeploy is different
Separate allowances instead of one pool. Indie is 20 uptime and API monitors plus 20 cron and heartbeat jobs, counted independently, so watching a scheduled job never uses up the allowance for the URL it serves. Cronitor bills every object from one metered pool.
Bundled pricing rather than a meter. Indie is a flat $5 a month, and it covers 3 projects, 20 uptime monitors and 20 cron jobs. On Cronitor's per-monitor pricing the same object count is a three-figure monthly line item before seats.
Analytics and error tracking on the same plan and the same projects, rather than as separately metered products.
Projects and environments as first-class concepts across every signal, including uptime checks. Cronitor's environments apply to job telemetry, and its uptime checks all run in the account's default environment.
Scale separation for client work: 50 projects and 20 members on one plan, so each client's monitors and jobs stay in their own project.
What switching gets you
Try PostDeploy if
- You are on the free tier and out of monitors, and per-object metering is not the shape of bill you wanted.
- You want one flat, predictable bill per month instead of a per-monitor meter that grows with your project.
- Your jobs are simple: they either ping on success or they do not, and the extra job semantics are not worth the price step.
- You want uptime, heartbeats, analytics and errors on one login today, without a per-monitor meter.
What moving actually costs
-
1
Every job's ping URL changes. Cronitor telemetry endpoints look like
https://cronitor.link/p/API_KEY/<key>?state=run|complete|fail, and they live in crontabs, Kubernetes manifests, GitHub Actions workflows and application code. PostDeploy heartbeats are a single URL pinged on success, so each call site becomes one shorter curl. - 2 If CronitorCLI rewrote your crontab, unwind the wrappers before you swap the URLs.
-
3
Remove the
cronitorSDK packages (Python, Node, Ruby, PHP). PostDeploy heartbeats need no SDK. - 4 Job semantics do not port. Schedule tolerance, failure tolerance, grace seconds, alert thresholds and duration assertions have no PostDeploy equivalent yet; a job relying on them will alert differently after the move.
- 5 Rebuild uptime checks by hand: headers, auth, timeouts and assertions.
- 6 Re-create alert routing. Notification lists, integrations and maintenance windows are per-vendor configuration.
Questions
Is PostDeploy a drop-in replacement for Cronitor?
Heartbeat monitoring and uptime checks map across directly. Cronitor's job-level features (start and finish events, run-duration assertions, overlap detection, crontab auto-discovery) have no PostDeploy equivalent today. PostDeploy covers the common case, a ping on success and an alert when it is late, and adds error tracking and analytics on the same plan.
How many monitors does Cronitor's free plan include?
Five, shared across cron jobs, heartbeats and uptime checks, at a 5-minute check interval floor. PostDeploy counts the two separately: 20 uptime and API monitors and 20 cron and heartbeat jobs, at the same interval.
What does Cronitor cost once you outgrow the free plan?
There is no flat next tier. Business is metered at $2 per monitor per month plus $5 per dashboard user, so the bill scales with every object you add. Enterprise starts at $6,000 a year. PostDeploy Indie is a flat $5 a month.
Can I use PostDeploy today?
Yes. Signup starts a 30-day Pro-size trial, with no credit card and no invite.
Other comparisons
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