With a crontab email, you get notified every time it runs. Their value proposition is to notify you when it doesn't run.
Part of this value is that their service keeps running. That is, you could set-up their service yourself (a process which expects to be pinged periodically, and emails/SMSs you if it isn't), but what if that service itself fails? (who shall watch the watcher)
It's not perfect: your periodic task might ping them, but not work fully (e.g. backup script runs, but didn't actually backup). You need some kind of verification (test-code) for your tasks that must succeed before you ping them. This is something they could help customers with - using blogs, articles, case-studies, and especially example code for common tasks (e.g. backup) etc. This would really help people (and incidentally publicize their service). Also, I love this copy:
"Once you use it, you realize you've been doing it wrong for years."
Comments
With a crontab email, you get notified every time it runs. Their value proposition is to notify you when it doesn't run.
Part of this value is that their service keeps running. That is, you could set-up their service yourself (a process which expects to be pinged periodically, and emails/SMSs you if it isn't), but what if that service itself fails? (who shall watch the watcher)
It's not perfect: your periodic task might ping them, but not work fully (e.g. backup script runs, but didn't actually backup). You need some kind of verification (test-code) for your tasks that must succeed before you ping them. This is something they could help customers with - using blogs, articles, case-studies, and especially example code for common tasks (e.g. backup) etc. This would really help people (and incidentally publicize their service). Also, I love this copy: "Once you use it, you realize you've been doing it wrong for years."