Healthchecks.io
Cron Monitoring
Healthchecks.io launched in July 2015, which means this year we turn 9. Time flies!
Healthchecks.io currently has 652 paying customers, and the monthly recurring revenue is 14043 USD. I’m happy to see MRR gradually go up, but I’m not optimizing for it. Healthchecks.io is sustainable as-is, and so I’m optimizing for enjoyment and life/work balance.
Healthchecks.io is still a one-man business. Until 2022, I was part-time contracting. Since January 2022 Healthchecks.io has been my only source of income, but I work on it part-time.
Read more (growth goals, hosting notes) –
Healthchecks.io is a monitoring service for cron jobs and scheduled tasks. It listens for "pings" (tiny HTTP requests sent by clients on a regular schedule) and sends out alerts whenever a client doesn't ping on time.
Currently Healthchecks.io is processing ~200 pings per second on average, with spikes to 2000+ pings/s at round hours. And, this morning, Healthhechks.io processed its 10'000'000'000th ping, a nice round number :-)
Each processed ping results in a database write operation. There's a fair amount of constant write activity on the database hosts but NVMe drives are amazing and there's still plenty of IOPS capacity. One thing I do watch out for is SSD wear out – with the current usage patterns a drive wears out in a less than a year.
-
2
Hey @cuu508 congrats on the latest milestone.
Cron job monitoring is a crowded market with so many companies. What's worked best for you to capture customers?
-
1
Thanks!
For Healthchecks.io, a big differentiator is the freemium model. The free plan lets you monitor 20 jobs (competitors typically offer 3 jobs, 1 job or no free plan at all, trial only). I regularly see users converting after being on the free plan for years. It takes patience, and obviously doesn't work if you want quick growth.
-
2
Thanks for the reply @cuu508 . 20 jobs sound like alot but I can why that works as a key differentiator.
Companies use it for so long that they cant afford to lose it or it's become a part of their work life. Very smart and as you said it takes patience but patience that pays off well :)
-
1
Yeah – by the time you hit the 20 cron job limit, you've built up experience and familiarity with the service. You might be using some of the niche features, or have set up custom integrations. If you're generally happy with the service, it's a reasonable choice to stick with what works.
-
1
Exactly and the users also become ambassadors spreading the good word about the product within their working community. The ROI on word of mouth is incredible.
-
-
-
-
The code powering Healthchecks.io is open-source (BSD license), and is developed in the open in a GitHub repository. You can go through the commits for a sneak peek at upcoming features, or to see any recently fixed blunders... You are also welcome to fork the code, implement any custom features you need, and host it on your own infrastructure.
The number of project's GitHub stars has been growing steadily and recently passed 2000!
-
2
Hey, I didn't know healthchecks is on here! I've been using your service to monitor some cronjobs for a few months and I had an awesome experience. Actually now I remember I tweeted about it ^^ https://twitter.com/Mackseraner/status/1075673547706691584
Anyways just wanted to let you know! Keep up the awesome service!
-
1
Happy to hear it is working well for you! And thanks for the Twitter shout-out!
-
-
2
Congrats on hitting this milestone! I found Healthchecks.io a while back on a Reddit thread and I fell in love with it instantly. Great work!!
Great product and wishing you continued success!
-
1
Awesome milestone 👍 Would it allow me to create cron jobs if I need to? Cheers 👍
-
1
Not quite – Healthchecks.io is an external service that your cron jobs "check in" with, each time they run. When any cron job does not "check in" on time, Healthchecks.io detects that and sends you an alert.
So you would still need to set up your cron jobs (or various other things – systemd timers, windows scheduled tasks, ...) normally, but with this service you will get an alert when something happens to them and they don't run on time.
-
-
1
👏👏👏👏 CONGRATS!!!
We've got Projects now! Organize your monitored services in Projects: cleaner dashboards and more fine-grained access control to your team and API clients.
A quick rundown of the new features: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2019/02/introducing-projects-on-healthchecks-io/
Hooray! On a related note, we api_ping.id column from integer to bigint. Otherwise, we would have a bad time soon after hitting 2B milestone.
1 Comment
Best of luck. Sounds very encouraging.