(Note: There was a previous project with this domain name in 2020 that's unrelated. I acquired the domain and built this from scratch in 2026.)
I run multiple data scraping sites with dozens of cron jobs across different servers. Jobs would fail silently and I'd find out days later from angry users.
I tried existing monitoring tools and they work well for basic ping/fail detection. But I wanted two things I couldn't find:
1. Progress tracking — For long-running jobs (backups, batch processing), I wanted to see "Processing batch 47/100" instead of just "running" or "done."
2. Instant help — When something broke at 3am, I didn't want to dig through docs or wait for email support. I wanted to ask "why is this down?" and get immediate guidance.
So I built CronBeats with those two features as the core focus.
Tech details: - 5 official SDKs (PHP, Node, Python, Ruby, Go) — all open source on GitHub - Free plan available (5 jobs, includes AI chat) - Built in PHP/MySQL (boring tech, works great)
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially on the progress tracking API design and whether the AI chat is actually useful vs gimmicky.
Happy to answer questions!