I don't know if this is what lead to this going up, but patio11 mentioned this service the other day in his epic post about Tarsnap: <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/</a> .. he uses Dead Man's Snitch to ensure his backups continue working (or more accurately, to notify him when they don't!)
Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the product itself doesn't require one to invest a lot of time, which is a good thing.<p>Just some questions:<p>- how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip?<p>- why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me).<p>- why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches?<p>I like the singular focus. Some people don't want very complicated feature rich monitor systems. I can imagine using a solution like this, esspecially in those cases, where more feature rich monitor systems are not being considered.<p>Yet, you offer a pricing model that suggests something completely different. That you are a very complicated feature-rich monitor system. The value you provide at each price point is simply not warranted.<p>I doubt this will have a large uptake, but if it does, i'm the first one tempted to compete. The required architecture is not complicated enough to warrant such high margins on such low costs. Cloud providers, even the budget ones like DigitalOcean, could easily offer something like this for free to their customers.<p>Now, you could argue that the price includes high quality support. But that's the not the audience of such a singular focus tool. If i need support, i'm obviously spending enough time interacting with it, that i would be better off with a more feature-rich monitor system. (which are available at similar price points)<p>Who's going to pay 600 dollars a year for 300 snitches? To build this at scale may take more effort, but from the perspective of your customer .. wouldn't most of them be able to build something like this for internal use in a single day? There are open source solutions with more features you can install with a single command.<p>I'm just wondering: but wouldn't you have much more customers, and hence, more profit, if you would provide 500 snitches at 100 dollars a year? Or alternatively, offer the service for free, but just charge for the apps yearly? In the end, a single snitch will do at most 24 empty GET requests a day, where you store a timestamp. A single VPS should be able to handle 10k snitches easily. (less than 3 requests per second)
Small gripe, based upon prior painful experience... you should always set a timeout on curl requests (or any others for that matter). There's not one by default!<p>It's -m <seconds> in the curl command line client.
Been using DMS for over quite a while now. It is an absolute must-have for anybody depending on scheduled tasks, and I haven't found anything like it.<p>And it's so cheap that there is no reason not to do it.<p>My only gripe is that I can only get alerted via email, which is the most often overlooked channel. I've hooked those emails up to HipChat, but some direct options for services like HipChat, Pagerduty etcetera would be nice.
As an aside, does anyone make a cron panel for humans? I'd find that really useful as I'm usually so busy being distracted by the next big thing that I forget to take care of repetitive tasks.<p>I know I can achieve something like that with my Google Calendar but I don't like the way repeating events fill it up -- it would be better if they just showed for the next occurrence.
Been using DMS for years now (it was recently bought by Collective Idea). Love it so much that I'm on the testimonials page.<p>The reason we started using it is because it's hard to notice the absence of an email alerting you that job xyz is complete. E.g. when our nightly backup would complete, we'd get an email. We'd also get N other emails nightly emails about other tasks that would run.<p>On the rare occasion that e.g. backup wouldn't complete it would be really tough to notice that you <i>didn't</i> get the email.<p>What you really want is to hear nothing UNLESS something goes wrong, which DMS makes happen. Love love love it.
Nice job! -- we actually needed this so badly a few years back that I wrote a simple app in a day to do this myself, though it's not very robust. I am actually surprised it's taken so long for someone to offer a SaaS version. Your pricing is so reasonable that I'd switch to your app if you could just flush out one more feature.<p>I actually <i>don't</i> want another app for reporting. I already use a monitoring service (pingdom) and would prefer to keep all of our "alerts" organized through a single service.<p>Could you offer a http-based public status page? Our system allowed each snitch to be tagged with a tag like "net.tourbuzz.db.replication.upToDate" and then a url like <a href="http://foo.com/deadoralive?filter=net.tourbuzz" rel="nofollow">http://foo.com/deadoralive?filter=net.tourbuzz</a> would allow us to use a single Pingdom monitor to alert us if any of snitches in that namespace failed.<p>This is a simple tagging structure that makes it easy to organize large numbers of snitches into manageable groups and easily integrate it into existing monitoring/alerting infrastructure.<p>Feel free to email me directly if you want more info.
Looks pretty cool! You should really rework the Plans page. At first I didn't realize there was more content below the "Free" plan, because I'm on a 13" OS X machine so scroll bars aren't visible by default.
If you are like me and already have nagios and nrpe in use, you can use a simple python script[0] to monitor the output of the cronjob and get an alert by nagios.
[0]<a href="https://github.com/rndmh3ro/check_exit-code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rndmh3ro/check_exit-code</a>
as much as I hate to admit it, jenkins makes a superb replacement for cron.<p>It keeps a history, has excellent error handling capabilities, and can scale quite well.<p>also the integration with git and the like makes updating jobs super easy.
I like it. Pricing seems a bit high though. Development wise this is a 1-2 day project.<p>I can't see myself spending much on something I could roll my own version of in a day or two.
So instead of MAILTO=sendmail I use MAILTO=<a href="http://deadmandssnitch/report" rel="nofollow">http://deadmandssnitch/report</a> or similar?