March 2026
Cron monitoring is a solved problem. There are at least a dozen services that do it. So why build another one?
Because every one I looked at made a simple thing complicated. Cron monitoring is conceptually trivial: a job runs, it pings a URL, and if the ping stops coming, something went wrong. That's it. The entire domain fits in one sentence.
But the existing tools bolt on dashboards, team management, integrations, agent software, container sidecars. The setup docs are longer than the problem description. You're deploying infrastructure to monitor infrastructure.
CronPulse is the version I wanted to exist. The setup is one line added to your crontab:
*/5 * * * * /path/to/your/job.sh && curl -s https://ping.trebben.dk/p/YOUR_SLUG
That's not a simplified example. That's the actual setup. No agent, no config file, no SDK, no container. Your job runs, it curls a URL. If it stops curling, you get an email.
The whole thing runs on SQLite in a single Node.js process. About 1700 lines of code. No Redis, no Postgres, no message queue, no Kubernetes. The database file is 332KB. I could email it to you.
I think there's a version of developer tooling that respects the actual complexity of the problem it solves, and doesn't import the complexity of the ecosystem around it. CronPulse is my attempt at that.
Free tier: 2 monitors, email alerts. No credit card.