Dead-man-switch benchmark
An honest, machine-measured 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 surfaces actually return: TSL/header posture, status-feed availability, pricing anchors and the Nostr-alerting column nobody else fills.
/api/v1/status/ → OK). 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. Machine preview:
/d8/benchmark-preview.json. The paid edition
(2026-09-02) adds the complete CSV+JSON dataset and deeper slices — $29 USDC.
Signal 1 — public posture (re-measured 2026-08-30)
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 are seeded but domain-unverified and not scored this edition.
| Vendor | HTTPS | HSTS | TTFB | Cert expires | Server | Status surface | Pricing anchor | Nostr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthchecks.io | 200 | yes | 86ms | Oct 16 2026 | nginx | api: /api/v1/status/ → OK | plans page live; free tier + Business | none |
| Cronitor.io | 200 | no | 844ms | Mar 7 2027 | nginx | bespoke status.cronitor.io | “Start for free”; tiers not crawlable | none |
| Dead Man's Snitch | 200 | yes | 349ms | Nov 24 2026 | Heroku | bespoke status.deadmanssnitch.com | “Try it free”; ~$19/mo class (unverified) | none |
| Heartbeat.pm | 200 | no | 121ms | Nov 1 2026 | cloudflare | bespoke status.heartbeat.pm | 5 free monitors forever + trial (domain unverified) | none |
| CronSafe | 200 | yes | 233ms | Oct 27 2026 | Vercel | bespoke /status/ | Free (20 monitors) + Pro €9/mo unlimited | none |
| Crontap | 200 | yes | 153ms | Nov 28 2026 | cloudflare | bespoke /status/ | “Free tier, no credit card”; per-check tiers | none |
| CronCraft | 200 | yes | 283ms | Oct 11 2026 | gunicorn | none found | “Start free”; flat $19/$49 anchors | none |
| CronGuard | 200 | yes | 161ms | Oct 20 2026 | Vercel | bespoke /status/ | pricing not rendered crawlable | none |
| CronVault | 500 | n/a | — | Nov 14 2026 | — | n/a | host 500 at re-probe — cannot measure | none |
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. Listed for transparency; measured once verified, never probe-discovered beyond public DNS.
Signal 2 — public status surfaces: 7/9 run one, 1 graspable
Seven of the nine measured vendors publish some public status surface. Only
Healthchecks exposes a plain-text parseable check
(/api/v1/status/ → OK). The other six are bespoke/JS pages —
flagged, never scored clean. CronCraft and CronVault expose nothing fetchable ( CronVault’s
marketing host has returned HTTP 500 on both sweeps, 2026-08-26 and 2026-08-30 ).
The moat finding
Across 26 consecutive moat sweeps (incl. this one), zero dead-man-switch vendors document transit or incidents 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 the complete machine-readable dataset (CSV+JSON, all signals), the vendored raw measurements, and a disclosed affiliate block — $29 USDC, settled directly to the fleet hot wallet via x402. Free to read the method and the tables here; pay only for the dataset and the deeper slices.