In many cases, paying for a service you could do yourself is more about having a throat to choke in case something goes wrong. I'm sure I could figure out cron/crontab if I took the time to learn about it but that's not my core skillset so paying $5/month is actually rather cheap for me (especially when the cost is passed along to a client who is less skilled at these things than I am).

Cron-job.org uses a similar interface and is much older than this project.

And if you don't wanna write crontab syntax, then there are other free alternatives like IFTTT

And what happens when this service you depend on gets shut down for whatever reason?

I get to bill the client for moving them to another service.

So best to choose one that's gonna shut down soon :-).

My startup is a Cronhub customer.

What makes cron-job.org not an alternative for us, is that this they monitor by crawling a URL that you provide. This is limiting and doesn't serve our use case for backend system monitoring.

By contrast, Cronhub gives us a public endpoint that we must ping by a certain interval to say that our service ran in the interval.

We also use their slack integration to show any monitoring failures in our #fires channel!

It's a monitoring service that "just works" and we don't have to maintain it, and if things go wrong we can reach out to someone since we are paying customers.

Also Tigran is very responsive!

On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd upload credentials into a free-as-beer site. I assume there are self hosted, open source, cron web ui projects.

Personally, you get what you pay for, also If I use something a lot I do not mind paying a few bucks a month to someone that worked hard creating it.

I was also thinking, it's a bit lower level but, using Github Actions with the 'on.schedule'

https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax...

I’m sure plenty of people thought the same thing about statuspage, yet they seem to be doing fine. People like easy and centralized. I think it’s a great idea, and there’s room for value-adds later down the line.

There are many reasons why people will pick up a paid product over free.

That's why Linux doesn't have more users than Windows.

Do you realize that price isn't the only thing!?

Cron is such an important piece of your infrastructure. Are you sure you want to depend on a free service for this?

People can select multiple cron vendors for critical flows, this helps make sure we could notice when one vendor doesn’t silently goes down.