Dead man's switch monitoring for cron jobs, background workers, and scheduled tasks. Your job checks in after every run. If it goes quiet, we alert you.
Free tier included. No credit card needed.
# your backup script runs, then pings DeadPing:
$ pg_dump mydb && curl -fsS https://deadping.io/p/a1b2c3
# no ping within the expected window?
# you get a Slack/email/Discord alert. immediately.
the problem
These failures cost teams hours of debugging, lost data, and broken trust with customers. Every week.
Your nightly backup stopped 3 weeks ago. The crontab entry is still there. The script hit a permission error after a deploy. You find out when you need the backup.
A 5-minute billing sync is running for 18 hours. Server resources are maxed. Nothing errors because the job isn't failing — it's just never finishing.
Uptime monitor says the server is fine. APM says no errors. But your ETL pipeline hasn't run in 2 days. No monitoring tool watches for things that didn't happen.
how it works
Name it, set the expected schedule (every 5 min, hourly, daily, or any cron expression), and choose where alerts go — Slack, Discord, email, or webhook.
Add curl -fsS --retry 3 https://deadping.io/p/your-id to the end of any cron job, background worker, or scheduled task. Any language. Any platform.
If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected window, you know immediately. Not next week. Not when a customer complains. Right now.
features
Paste a cron expression. DeadPing parses it, understands when to expect the next ping, and knows exactly when to alert. Handles timezones, DST, and edge cases.
Email, Slack, Discord, and raw webhooks. Route different monitors to different channels. Database backups alert the on-call. Marketing jobs alert the growth team.
Every check-in is logged with timestamp and duration. See if a job is gradually getting slower. Spot the pattern before it becomes a 3am incident.
A job scheduled for 2:00am might start at 2:00:03. Set a grace period per monitor so you get real alerts, not noise. Default 5 minutes, adjustable down to 1.
use cases
pricing
Founding member pricing — locked in forever for early adopters.
$0/mo
Side projects and personal servers.
$14/mo
Teams running production workloads.
$39/mo
Scaling infrastructure.
Join the waitlist for early access and founding member pricing.