Why metered monitoring is the wrong default
Per-monitor pricing quietly trains your team to instrument less. gochron charges a flat tier so the 51st check doesn't change the bill, and a real on-call rotation isn't a separate vendor.
If you've ever added a cron-heartbeat to a job and then deleted it a week later because the monitoring bill ticked up, this post is for you.
Most monitoring tools meter per-monitor. Every check you add is a line item. The marketing copy calls it "scale as you grow." In practice it trains the team to instrument less, not more, because the bill grows in a straight line and nobody wants to defend it at the next finance review.
That's the wrong direction. Monitoring should be the thing you over-do. The cost of an unmonitored cron job is the silent failure that shows up two weeks later as missing data. The cost of an unmonitored SSL cert is a Monday morning browser warning. You want the team to add the check, not weigh it against the invoice.
What we did instead
gochron is flat per tier. Free is permanent and includes 20 monitors with 60-day history. Pro is $29/mo for 100 monitors. Pro+ is $49 for 250. Team is $99 for 1,000. Adding the 51st check on Pro doesn't change the invoice. You don't ration what you instrument.
The number that matters is the tier, not the check count.
What about runaway usage
The honest counter-argument: flat-rate "feels like" it caps usage. It does, by design. Each tier has a monitor limit and the limit is the gate. If you hit it, you upgrade the tier (a known, named number), not the invoice line item. That predictability is the whole point. A "no surprise bill" promise that comes from a hard cap is more credible than a "we'll discount this if you complain" promise that comes from a per-unit meter.
If you're at the point where you genuinely need 2,000 monitors, the Team tier exists. Beyond that, talk to us. Custom contracts get their own shape, not a usage-multiplied invoice.
The other half of the bill
Monitoring is usually one of three things you're paying for. The other two are an on-call pager (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and a status page (Statuspage, Better Stack Status). Three separate vendors, three separate invoices, three separate logins, three separate sources of truth about who's on this week.
gochron is all three. Same product, same schema, same bill. An incident opened by a probe failure routes through the same alert rules to the same on-call rotation, and the same incident shows up on the same status page. Your customers see the outage you got paged for, because both surfaces read from the same row in the same database.
The product wedge is the pricing model. The product is the unbundling.
Where to look
Pricing has the full tier table. Free tier needs no card and is permanent. If you have a question that the page doesn't answer, the FAQ is the next stop, and beyond that please write in: we read every message.