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?