StatusCake's pricing page reads simple: four tiers, a free plan, and specific monitor counts at each step. It is simple, as far as monitoring pricing pages go. The part that's easy to miss on a first read is that "monitors" is one shared number, and StatusCake's dead man's switch feature, Push Monitoring, counts against that same number as your uptime checks. Nobody writing about StatusCake pricing mentions this, so here's the real breakdown, verified against StatusCake's live pricing and knowledge base on October 20, 2026.
How much does StatusCake cost?
Four tiers, priced by monitor count and check frequency:
Free $0/mo 10 monitors 5-min checks
Superior $20.41/mo ($24.49 m2m) 100 monitors 1-min checks
Business $66.66/mo ($79.99 m2m) 300 monitors 30-sec checks
Enterprise custom unlimited negotiated
Superior and Business also scale up page speed, domain, SSL, and server monitor allowances (Superior adds 15 page speed, 50 domain, 50 SSL, and 3 server monitors; Business adds 30, 120, 100, and 10). None of that extra matters if all you're watching is uptime and cron jobs. What matters is the one number at the start of each row: total monitors.
Does StatusCake's free plan include cron job monitoring?
Yes, and it's a real feature, not a watered-down version. StatusCake calls it Push Monitoring: you create a push test, get a unique URL back, and your cron job or script calls that URL on success. If a push doesn't arrive within the period you configured, StatusCake treats the test as down and alerts you, the same dead man's switch pattern as any heartbeat monitor.
The catch is in StatusCake's own documentation: Push Monitoring "can be found under uptime monitoring." It isn't a separate quota. Every push test you create is one more monitor out of your plan's total. On the free plan, that total is 10, shared between every HTTP check and every cron job you watch.
Does StatusCake support Telegram?
Yes, on every plan including free. Telegram sits alongside Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Microsoft Teams, phone calls, and SMS in StatusCake's integration list. If you came here wondering whether you'd need a paid tier just to get Telegram alerts working, you don't.
How does the monitor-count math actually work out?
Here's where the free plan stops being free. Say you're running 6 small apps (6 uptime checks) and you've wired up heartbeats on 6 cron jobs (6 push tests). That's 12 monitors, two over the free limit of 10. StatusCake doesn't let you buy "2 more monitors." The next tier up is Superior, the full $20.41/month (or $24.49 billed monthly), for 100 monitors whether you need 12 or 90.
That jump, from $0 to $20+/month the moment you cross 10 combined checks, is the part no pricing roundup covers, because most of them don't realize uptime and heartbeats share a pool in the first place.
When should you stay on StatusCake?
StatusCake earns its price for setups that actually use the rest of the product:
- Page speed, domain, and SSL monitoring in the same dashboard. CanaryHub doesn't do any of these. If you want uptime, performance, domain expiry, and certificate monitoring under one login, StatusCake's bundle is a genuine fit.
- Server monitoring. The Superior and Business tiers add dedicated server monitor slots for resource and process checks, which CanaryHub doesn't offer either.
- Phone call and SMS escalation. StatusCake has it built in. CanaryHub's SMS alerting isn't live yet.
- High combined monitor counts with mixed check types. If you're already past 100 checks across uptime, SSL, domain, and page speed, you're buying a suite, and StatusCake's per-tier pricing is reasonable for that breadth.
How does StatusCake compare to a flat-rate monitor for uptime and cron jobs?
If uptime and cron heartbeats are the whole job, and you don't need page speed, domain, SSL, or server checks, the monitor-count ceiling is the only thing StatusCake pricing does that actually costs you money.
CanaryHub prices by project, not by monitor:
- Free: 1 project, 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, Telegram alerts batched every 4 hours.
- Pro, $8.99/mo ($5.92/mo billed yearly): 3 projects, unlimited monitors, 60-second checks, instant alerts.
- Business, $24.99/mo (coming soon): unlimited projects and monitors, team seats, 30-second checks.
Worth being honest about both directions here. CanaryHub's own heartbeat monitors also count toward a monitor quota, same idea as StatusCake, but Pro removes the ceiling entirely for $8.99/month instead of $20.41. The 12-monitor example above (6 apps, 6 cron jobs) that forces StatusCake's Superior tier fits comfortably inside CanaryHub's unlimited Pro plan, at under half the price, with faster checks.
How do I set up a cron heartbeat?
The pattern is the same for StatusCake's push URL or CanaryHub's ping URL:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
/usr/local/bin/nightly-backup.sh
# Only runs if the backup above succeeded. Silence past the window = alert.
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 "https://ingest.canaryhub.ai/ping/YOUR_TOKEN" > /dev/null
One line at the end of the job, after the real work succeeds. If the job crashes, hangs, or the server it runs on goes dark, the ping never arrives, and that silence is what triggers the alert.
If you're deciding between the two, add up your actual monitor count first, uptime checks plus cron jobs together, and check which side of StatusCake's 10-monitor free line you land on. For more on the cron side specifically, see our guide on monitoring a cron job with a dead man's switch.