Heartfly vs Dead Man's Snitch: a fair comparison
Dead Man's Snitch is the original 'snitch on missed crons' brand. Heartfly is a modern alternative with Telegram-first alerts and flat pricing.
- · Dead Man's Snitch (DMS) is the elder statesman — they coined the 'snitch' framing for cron monitoring around 2012.
- · Heartfly is a modern, leaner take with Telegram-first alerts and flat-rate pricing.
- · Both do the same fundamental job. The choice is brand familiarity vs alert-channel fit.
Side-by-side
| Feature | Heartfly | Dead Man's Snitch |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | +Yes — limited checks | 1 free snitch |
| Cron heartbeat | Core | Core |
| Slack alerts | Yes | Yes |
| Telegram alerts | +First-class | Via webhook |
| PagerDuty integration | Webhook out | +Native |
| Cron expression parsing | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing model | +Flat tiers | Per-snitch tiers |
| Brand age | New | +Established 2012 |
When you should pick which
- · You're already using DMS and PagerDuty integration is wired into your incident workflow.
- · Your team has familiarity with the 'snitch' terminology and DMS's mental model.
- · You only have 1–5 critical crons and the per-snitch pricing fits.
- · You have 10+ crons and flat-rate pricing beats per-snitch math.
- · You want Telegram alerts as a primary channel.
- · You're starting fresh and want a modern UI/API rather than a 12-year-old codebase.
Pricing math
1 cron: DMS is free for 1 snitch. We're free here too.
10 crons: DMS Small is $19/mo (50 snitches). Heartfly paid is comparable.
50+ crons: DMS Medium tier scales up. Heartfly stays flat-rate. The math leans Heartfly at higher counts.
Try Heartfly free
Cron monitoring with first-class Telegram alerts. Modern UI, flat pricing.
FAQ
Will my DMS snitch URL work as a Heartfly endpoint?
URLs are host-scoped. Migration is replacing DMS URLs with Heartfly URLs in your cron commands. Easy if you have a small number of crons; we have a migration script for larger setups.
Does Heartfly auto-detect missed pings without configuring expected interval?
We use the cron expression you provide to compute expected interval. If you don't have a cron expression, you set an interval manually.
What about PagerDuty?
We send to PagerDuty via webhook. Less native than DMS's first-class integration. If PagerDuty is critical, that's a vote for DMS.
Why pick a newer product over a mature one?
Telegram alerts as first-class, modern UI, flat pricing. If those don't matter to you, DMS is a solid choice.
Disclaimer: Pricing accurate as of 2026-05-09. Competitor info pulled from public website. We may have it wrong — email legal@getheartfly.com for corrections. Dead Man's Snitch's site: deadmanssnitch.com.