Cronhub Alternatives: Where to Migrate Now That Cronhub Has Shut Down
If you landed here, you're probably one of the developers who got the email: Cronhub, the cron job scheduling and monitoring service, is shutting down. The team announced the sunset in March 2026, paid subscriptions were cancelled on May 31, 2026, and access ended entirely on June 30, 2026. If your scripts are still pinging cronhub.io URLs, they're pinging into the void right now, not the last thing you want to discover after a job silently fails.
What Happened to Cronhub
Cronhub launched in 2018 as a dead man's switch style monitoring tool: you point your cron jobs at a unique Cronhub URL, and if a ping doesn't arrive when expected, Cronhub alerts you. It built a genuinely loyal following among developers who wanted job scheduling and monitoring without managing their own infrastructure, with customers including companies like Buffer and ProtonMail. The free plan covered 1 scheduler and 1 monitor with email and Slack alerts, and paid plans started at $19/month for 5 schedulers, 10 monitors, webhook integration, and weekly reports.
The team announced in March 2026 that they were sunsetting the product, citing a shift in focus to other projects. Existing customers were told to migrate before their paid subscriptions were cancelled on May 31, 2026, with full access to the dashboard continuing only until June 30, 2026. As of now, that window has closed. If you haven't moved your monitors elsewhere, your cron jobs currently have no monitoring behind them at all.
What to Do Right Now
If you still have any scripts or crontabs pointing at cronhub.io URLs, the priority is finding and replacing every one of them, not exporting historical data at this point, since the service is no longer live to export from. Search your codebase and server configs for the domain:
Once you've found them, set up equivalent monitors on a new platform and swap the URLs one by one. Since Cronhub's core mechanic (ping a URL, get alerted if it's late or missing) is close to standard across this category, the migration is usually a find-and-replace exercise, not a rebuild.
What to Look for in a Cronhub Replacement
Cronhub set a reasonable bar for what a cron monitoring tool should offer for free and at its entry price, so it's worth being specific about what to check for in whatever you choose next:
The same simple ping-based setup: a unique URL per job, curl it on completion, get alerted if it doesn't arrive. No agents, no code changes beyond the URL.
Uptime, SSL, and DNS monitoring alongside cron: Cronhub was cron-focused only. If you've been meaning to also watch your websites and certificates, this migration is a natural point to add that.
Team alerts and integrations you actually use: Slack was there from the free tier on Cronhub. Check that Discord, Telegram, or whatever your team uses is covered without jumping straight to an enterprise tier.
A status page included in the plan: Cronhub didn't offer one. If you want to communicate job or service health to anyone outside your team, look for this bundled in rather than bolted on.
A service with a business model that isn't just a free lead-gen tool: Cronhub's shutdown is a reminder that a tool with an unclear path to profitability can disappear with a few months' notice.
Downdar: A Straightforward Next Home for Your Monitors
Downdar monitors websites, APIs, ports, SSL certificates, and DNS records from multiple global checkpoints, and lets any cron job or background task check in with a single ping, the same core mechanic Cronhub used, in the same plan as everything else you need watched.
Setting up a heartbeat monitor is a one-line change to any scheduled job:
Downdar learns the job's rhythm from its check-ins and opens an incident the moment a run is missed or late, no library, no agent, just a plain HTTP call from wherever your job already runs.
Every check, whether it's a website, a port, or a heartbeat, is confirmed from multiple global checkpoints before an incident opens, so a single region's network blip doesn't wake anyone up for nothing. Status pages are embeddable directly into your own app or marketing site with a single iframe, restricted to the domains you whitelist, and included in your plan (each page carries a small "Status page by Downdar" notice).
Everything above is also fully scriptable. Downdar's REST API covers monitors, heartbeats, groups, tags, status pages, alert channels, and regions, if you'd rather script your migration than click through each job by hand.
Downdar vs Cronhub (Before Its Shutdown): Side by Side
| Feature | Cronhub (former) | Downdar |
|---|---|---|
| Cron/heartbeat monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Website / API uptime monitoring | -- | ✓ |
| SSL & DNS monitoring | -- | ✓ |
| Status pages | -- | Included in plan |
| Multi-region confirmation before alerting | -- | ✓ |
| Still operating | No, shut down June 30, 2026 | Yes |
| Entry paid price | $19/mo (5 schedulers, 10 monitors) | $9/mo (10 monitors, 10 cron & heartbeat monitors) |
| Built for | Developers who wanted cron scheduling and monitoring combined | Indie builders needing uptime, SSL, DNS, and cron monitoring long-term |
The table is honest about the trade-off. Cronhub combined job scheduling with monitoring in a way few competitors do, so if you were relying on that scheduling piece specifically, you'll want to check whether your new tool needs to replace that too, not just the monitoring. But its narrower monitoring scope and, most importantly, the fact that it no longer exists, make the comparison mostly academic now.
Pricing
Downdar offers three plans, each with a 30-day trial (credit card required):
Starter at $9 per month includes 10 monitors with 5-minute checks across HTTP, Ping, TCP, SSL, and DNS, plus 10 cron & heartbeat monitors, email alerts, and 1 status page.
Growth at $29 per month includes 50 monitors and 50 cron & heartbeat monitors, 1-minute checks, multiple global checkpoints, custom alert channels (Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, webhook), and 5 embeddable status pages.
Scale at $99 per month includes 250 monitors, 250 cron & heartbeat monitors, 25 status pages, and priority support with an uptime SLA.
The Bottom Line
Cronhub is gone, and if your scripts are still pointed at it, they've had no real monitoring behind them since the end of June. That's worth fixing today, not after the next silent failure. Whatever you migrate to, make sure it covers more ground than Cronhub did, uptime, SSL, and DNS included, not just cron, so this isn't a migration you'll have to repeat.
Downdar covers uptime, SSL, DNS, and cron monitoring in one plan starting at $9/month, with a status page included. You can find and replace your old Cronhub URLs and be back to being monitored in minutes.