DeadManCheck vs Dead Man's Snitch

Dead Man's Snitch is a solid, simple cron monitor. DeadManCheck does everything it does, adds output assertions and duration anomaly detection, and costs less. Here's the full breakdown.

Feature comparison

Feature	DeadManCheck	Dead Man's Snitch
100 monitors	$12/mo	$19/mo
Free tier	5 monitors	1 snitch
Output assertions	Yes	No
Duration anomaly detection	Yes (rolling avg)	No
Open source / self-hostable	Yes	No
Slack / Discord / Telegram alerts	Yes (all plans)	Paid plans only
PagerDuty integration	$39/mo (Team)	$49/mo (Surveillance Van)

Where Dead Man's Snitch wins

Field Agent — DMS has a local daemon that monitors cron jobs without requiring outbound HTTP from the job itself. Useful in locked-down environments.
Established track record — DMS has been around since 2012. If you're already using it and happy with the basics, switching isn't urgent.
Unlimited team members on all plans — even the $5/mo plan includes unlimited teammates.

Where DeadManCheck wins

Output assertions — the check DMS can't do

Dead Man's Snitch asks one question: did the job check in? DeadManCheck asks a second: did it actually do anything? Send a count with your ping and set an assertion — "alert if count is 0". Your backup job running but exporting nothing gets caught. DMS lets it through.

# One extra param. One extra layer of protection.
curl -fsS "https://deadmancheck.io/ping/TOKEN?count=1547" > /dev/null

Duration anomaly detection

If your 90-second ETL job starts taking 45 minutes, DeadManCheck flags it using a rolling average baseline. DMS has no concept of "this job is taking longer than usual."

Open source and self-hostable

DeadManCheck is open source on GitHub. Run it yourself for free. DMS is closed-source SaaS only.

Pricing breakdown

At 100 monitors: Dead Man's Snitch $19/mo → DeadManCheck $12/mo. We're cheaper at this tier.

At 300 monitors: Dead Man's Snitch $49/mo → DeadManCheck $39/mo (Team). Still cheaper, with PagerDuty included.

Free tier: DMS gives 1 snitch. DeadManCheck gives 5 monitors.

DMS pricing verified April 2026 from deadmanssnitch.com/plans.

Choose Dead Man's Snitch if…

You need the Field Agent (local daemon monitoring)
You're already on DMS and the basics cover your needs
You have a locked-down environment with no outbound HTTP from cron

Choose DeadManCheck if…

You want output assertions — "did the job actually do something?"
You need duration anomaly detection
You want open source / self-hosting as an option
You're monitoring 5+ jobs and want a better price

Migration takes 10 minutes

DeadManCheck uses the same ping-URL pattern as DMS. Swap the URL in your scripts, recreate your monitors, done. The quickstart has copy-paste curl examples for every common setup.

Learn more

Start monitoring free — no credit card needed

Free for 5 monitors. $12/mo for 100.