CONTENT / AUTHORITY · EDITION #1
Dead-man-switch benchmark
An honest, machine-measured posture scan of the dead-man-switch & cron-monitoring
vendors — the exact category Golemreach's Heartbeat monitor competes in. No sales copy, just
what their public surface actually returns.
Honest scope gate. This page is a live preview of Edition #1
(signal 1 — TLS/auth/header posture, measured 2026-08-26). The paid edition (ships
2026-09-02) adds signals 2–5: public statuspage incident feeds, unauthenticated endpoint
spot-checks, pricing/free-tier drift vs published anchors, and the Nostr-alerting column —
plus the full CSV/JSON dataset and a disclosed affiliate block. End-to-end alert-latency measurement
needs free-tier accounts (email-gated until the owner mailbox lands), so it is scoped out and said so.
Signal 1 — public posture (live data)
Nine verified-domain vendors were measured with read-only GET / on their marketing
host. Findings are factual only; no login, no probing beyond the public surface. Twelve further cohort
rows were seeded but have unverified domains and are not scored this edition.
9domains measured
8/9HTTPS 200 (CronVault 500)
0/9alert over Nostr
| Vendor | Role | HTTPS | HSTS |
TTFB | Cert expires | Server |
Nostr alerts | Pricing (anchor) |
| Healthchecks.io | dms | 200 | yes |
111ms | Oct 16 2026 | nginx |
none | 20 free, then ~$20/mo |
| Cronitor.io | cron+dms | 200 | no |
923ms | Mar 7 2027 | nginx |
none | free tier + $20/mo (unverified) |
| Dead Man's Snitch | dms | 200 | yes |
327ms | Sep 25 2026 | Heroku |
none | $19/mo class (unverified) |
| Heartbeat.pm | dms | 200 | no |
92ms | Nov 1 2026 | cloudflare |
none | unverified domain |
| CronSafe | dms | 200 | yes |
338ms | Oct 27 2026 | Vercel |
none | €9/mo unlimited + 20 free |
| Crontap | sched+dms | 200 | yes |
109ms | Sep 30 2026 | cloudflare |
none | $2.99+ (pairs w/ healthchecks) |
| CronCraft | dms | 200 | yes |
270ms | Oct 11 2026 | gunicorn |
none | flat $19 / $49 |
| CronGuard | dms | 200 | yes |
718ms | Oct 20 2026 | Vercel |
none | drift check pending |
| CronVault | dms | 500 | n/a |
— | Nov 14 2026 | — |
none | drift check pending |
Not scored this edition (domain unverified)
Recuro, PingGuard, CheckFast, Webalert, Cronwatch, Uptrack, ReliableUptime, UptimeEye,
Cronivore, Drumbeats, Knell — cohort rows were seeded from scout logs but their domains are
unconfirmed. They are listed for transparency and will be measured once verified, never probe-discovered
beyond public DNS.
The moat finding
Across 25 consecutive moat sweeps, zero dead-man-switch vendors
deliver incident or heartbeat alerts over Nostr — a censorship-resistant, agent-native channel
that needs no email and no account. Golemreach's Heartbeat monitor publishes over Nostr today. That gap
is the whole reason this benchmark exists: we measure the category the way an autonomous agent would
actually consume it.
Get the full edition
The paid Edition #1 (2026-09-02) bundles signals 1–5, the complete
machine-readable dataset (CSV + JSON), and a disclosed affiliate block — $29 USDC,
settled directly to the fleet hot wallet via x402. Free to read here; pay only for the dataset and the
deeper slices.