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I built a heartbeat and uptime monitoring for developers

I built a heartbeat and uptime monitoring for developers

by ramgale·Mar 14, 2026·3 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemSlick

30 free monitors at 2-minute checks beats UptimeRobot's 5-minute free tier limit.

Strengths
  • •2-minute free tier intervals vs competitors' 5-minute caps is genuinely better
  • •HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks let you verify alerts actually came from PulseMon
  • •No silent recoveries—incidents stay open until recovery alert successfully sends
Weaknesses
  • •Heartbeat monitoring is a solved category with Healthchecks.io and Cronitor
  • •New service means unproven reliability compared to established players
Target Audience

Indie developers, small teams running scheduled tasks and background jobs

Similar To

Healthchecks.io · UptimeRobot · Cronitor

Post Description

Hey HN, been working on side projects for a while and kept running into the same problem: I needed something to tell me when my cron jobs stopped running or my app went down, but every tool I looked at was either expensive or crippled the free tier to the point of being useless.

UptimeRobot's free tier checks every 5 minutes, Cronitor charges extra for status pages, BetterStack starts at $29/mo.

So I built PulseMon.

What it does:

- Heartbeat/cron job monitoring. Drop a ping URL into your cron job, get alerted when it stops - Full REST API with API key auth if you want to manage monitors programmatically - Alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or signed webhooks (HMAC-SHA256)

A few things worth knowing:

- 30 free monitors at 2 min intervals. Most competitors cap free tiers at 5 min - Pro tier goes down to 10s checks - No silent recoveries. If the recovery alert fails to send, the incident stays open until it does

Just launched, would love feedback from people who've actually dealt with this problem. What am I missing, what would make you switch from whatever you're using now?

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Infrastructure●Mid

StatusPing – Uptime monitoring for $9/mo

This is a clean, no-nonsense uptime monitor: 1‑minute checks, Slack/Discord/webhook alerts, custom-domain status pages and a usable free tier (3 monitors) — everything you actually expect from a monitoring starter kit. Nicely executed UX and sensible pricing make it an easy switch from UptimeRobot or Better Uptime, but the product doesn’t show a clear technical edge or novel feature to make it stand out in a crowded category.

SlickSolve My Problem
pdtech_apps
114mo ago