illari vs Dead Man's Snitch
Facts checked 2026-08-31. Vendor pricing changes; verify before deciding.
Dead Man's Snitch has done one thing well since 2011: expect a check-in, alert when it's missing. illari covers the same ground and adds real cron-expression scheduling, checks on what the run reported, and a broader set of alert channels without paywalling them.
| Dead Man's Snitch | illari | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Heartbeat, interval-based | Heartbeat + run content, cron-expression aware |
| Free tier | 1 snitch | 25 monitors |
| Paid | Tiered by job count ($5/3, $19/100, $49/300) | Flat $20/mo |
| Scheduling | Fixed intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, ...) | Full 5-field cron + IANA timezone, DST handled |
| Run content | Job output capture on the $49 tier | Exit code, duration anomaly, metric threshold rules on Pro |
| Channels on the cheapest paid tier | Email; Slack and others from $19 | Email on every tier; all channels on Pro, none metered |
Both sides adjust pricing; confirm the current numbers.
Where illari is different
- Cron-expression scheduling. Dead Man's Snitch works in fixed intervals. illari takes the actual cron expression and an IANA timezone, so “weekdays at 06:15 Eastern” is a schedule, not an approximation, and it's DST-correct.
- Run-content alerting. illari alerts on a non-zero exit, a run far off its baseline, and threshold rules on your own numbers, not just the absence of a ping.
- Larger free tier and unpaywalled channels. 25 monitors free, and Slack, Discord, PagerDuty and the rest come with Pro rather than a higher bucket.
Where Dead Man's Snitch is the better pick
- You want the simplest possible thing and only have a few jobs on plain intervals. It does exactly that, and it's proven.
- Long track record. It has run since the early 2010s under the same team.
- Basecamp-adjacent workflow. If your team already lives in that ecosystem, the fit is natural.
Dead Man's Snitch is the right call for a handful of interval-based jobs and nothing more. Choose illari when the schedules are real cron expressions, cross timezones, or you want to alert on the run's result.
Try illari
25 monitors free, $20/mo for everything, monitors not metered. One HTTP request from the job.