Healthchecks.io Free Plan: free credits and offers
Best offer on record: Hosted Hobbyist Free Plan (permanent free tier). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Hosted Hobbyist Free Plan (permanent free tier) high confidence
The hosted service's Hobbyist plan is $0/month with no time limit: monitor 20 jobs (cron jobs / heartbeats), 100 log entries kept per job (oldest entries evicted when the cap is hit — a job pinging every 5 minutes retains only ~8 hours of history; a weekly job retains ~2 years). No SMS/WhatsApp/phone-call credits on the free tier; email, webhook, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Pushover, Signal, ntfy, Matrix, GitHub Issues and other web-based alert channels work. Paid tiers for comparison: Supporter $5/mo (same limits, donation only), Business $20/mo (100 jobs, 1000 log entries, 50 SMS/WhatsApp + 20 phone credits, email support; $16/mo billed annually), Business Plus $80/mo (1000 jobs, 500 SMS/WhatsApp + 100 phone credits, priority support; $64/mo annual, 20% annual discount).
Eligibility
Open to anyone (including students and startups): sign up with just an email address via magic-link; no credit card, no .edu address, no region restriction, no funding or company-age criteria. Not a trial — a permanently free tier. Running multiple accounts to exceed the 20-job cap is explicitly labeled abuse by Healthchecks.io.
How to claim
Go to healthchecks.io, click Create Free Account / sign up for the Hobbyist plan with an email address (magic link), no payment details. Then create up to 20 checks (ping URLs or cron expressions) and have your job curl the ping URL on each run.
Expiry
No expiry; free forever. Author has publicly stated (July 2024 blog post) that he is not planning to tighten free-plan limits or raise paid prices.
Gotchas
No phone/SMS/WhatsApp alerts on the free tier (paid only). 100-entry log cap means short retention for fast jobs. Inactive accounts receive 'Inactive Account Notification' emails; long inactivity may affect the account. Capping out at 20 jobs means upgrading to Business at $20/mo. Payments when you do pay run via Braintree (PayPal division); no card data stored on Healthchecks.io servers.
Self-Hosted Open-Source Healthchecks (free, unlimited) high confidence
Healthchecks is open source under the BSD license (code on GitHub, developed in the open). Self-hosting the full product on your own infrastructure is free with no check-count limits — 'unlimited checks on your own infrastructure', which is the offer referenced for students building on cheap/homelab or university cloud credits. You run the entire service (web app + PostgreSQL + object storage for ping bodies) and every feature is available, minus the hosted service's ops guarantees (Hetzner bare metal, hot standby, daily S3 backups).
Eligibility
Open to anyone — no account, no credit card, no .edu, no region limit. Costs shift to you: you need hosting, and you become the operator (backups, upgrades, failover). The about page states plainly: 'Healthchecks is free software, and can be self-hosted.'
How to claim
Clone the BSD-licensed GitHub repo (github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks), run the Django app + PostgreSQL per its docs, point your cron jobs at your own instance's ping URLs.
Expiry
No expiry — BSD license is permanent; the project is accepting contributions and the author (one-person SIA Monkey See Monkey Do, Latvia) keeps it maintained as of 2026 (11 years in business per the About page).
Gotchas
You pay for your own infrastructure and all ops burden (database failover is manual even on the hosted version, and a single operator handles it); no 'free' in the sense of zero cost — only zero license cost. Feature parity with the hosted version can lag or differ; you don't get the hosted reliability track record (99.9%+ since 2015).
Free Business Plan for Open-Source Projects and Nonprofits high confidence
Healthchecks.io offers the Business plan free of charge for open-source projects and nonprofits — worth $20/month — including 100 monitored jobs, 1000 log entries per job, 50 SMS/WhatsApp credits and 20 phone-call credits, plus email support. It is not a student or startup program; the eligible categories are OSS projects and nonprofits. The About page tracks ~106 such accounts (OSS + nonprofit) vs ~1,236 paying.
Eligibility
Open-source projects and registered nonprofits only. No .edu email, no student license, and no dedicated startup program exists on the official pages. No published funding caps or age criteria; eligibility is judged by the team on request. No region limit stated. No credit card required (plan is free).
How to claim
Email contact@healthchecks.io (listed in the FAQ) asking for the free Business plan as an open-source project or nonprofit; they set the account up. It is not self-serve — you must ask.
Expiry
No published expiry or renewal date; it is a standing program (listed on the pricing-page FAQ and FAQ as of today, 2026-10-22).
Gotchas
Not available to for-profit startups or individual students — claiming it as a commercial startup would be misusing the program. It's manual/e-mail based with no SLA on response; the Free tier (20 jobs) already covers most personal/student use cases. SMS/WhatsApp/phone credits are consumed by alert volume; when they run out you'd need a paid upgrade to top up.