Why Flat-Rate Pricing Wins for Cron Monitoring
By CronFu Team
Most cron monitoring services charge per monitor. Sounds fair, right? You pay for what you use.
Except it creates a perverse incentive: you stop monitoring things.
The Per-Monitor Tax
At $0.50–$1.00 per monitor per month, a server with 30 cron jobs costs $15–$30/month just to watch. Scale to 10 servers and you're looking at $150–$300/month. For cron monitoring.
So teams do what's rational: they monitor the "important" jobs and skip the rest. The nightly cleanup? Skip it. The log rotation? Skip it. The cache warming? Skip it.
Until the cleanup job fails, disk fills up, and your production database goes down at 3 AM.
Flat-Rate: Monitor Everything
CronFu's Pro plan gives you 250 monitors for $29/month — and you can monitor every single cron job on a typical fleet for $79/month on the Team plan. Add a curl to every single crontab entry. Monitor your backups, your cleanups, your health checks, your data syncs — everything.
| Cronitor (Team) | CronFu | |
|---|---|---|
| 50 monitors | $100/mo | $12/mo (Starter) |
| 100 monitors | $200/mo | $29/mo (Pro) |
| 500 monitors | $1,000/mo | $79/mo (Team) |
| 1,000 monitors | $1,960/mo | $79/mo (Team) |
The math is simple: at 60 monitors, CronFu is already cheaper. At 500, it's 92% cheaper.
The Hidden Cost of Not Monitoring
Every unmonitored cron job is a silent risk. It might run fine for months, then fail once — and that one failure cascades into an incident that costs more than a year of monitoring fees.
Flat-rate pricing removes the decision entirely. Just monitor everything.