What makes it different
Built for people who need to trust the alert.
The cron and heartbeat monitoring category shares a few blind spots. Here is how Mortemain lines up against the typical monitor, on the things that are built and verifiable today.
| Capability | The typical heartbeat monitor | Mortemain | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dead-simple setup | A secret URL to call, no agent to install. | One preconfigured line to paste, no agent, no SDK, no config file. | Live in minutes, nothing to run or maintain. |
| Check-in authentication | An unauthenticated secret URL. Anyone who captures or leaks it can replay it to keep a dead check looking alive. | Optional HMAC-signed check-ins with a timestamp window. | Nobody can fake a successful run. |
| Encryption at rest | Commonly infrastructure or disk-level encryption. | Cryptographically partitioned multi-tenancy: sensitive fields encrypted with a per-account key. | A stolen database stays unreadable. |
| Flapping | Re-notification or nagging when a check keeps failing. | Dedicated flapping detection, with a single notice on genuine recovery. | One clear alert, not a storm of them. |
| Data residency | Frequently hosted outside the EU. | An EU business, data in France and Germany, under the GDPR. | EU data, GDPR by default. |
| Email check-ins | HTTP only, so a box that can't run curl or reach an API has no way to check in. | Check in over HTTP or simply by sending an email, on every plan including Free. | Even a legacy or locked-down box can check in. |
| Pricing model | Often per-monitor or per-seat, which pushes you to ration checks. | Flat per plan, never per-monitor or per-seat. | Monitor everything, without rationing. |
This compares Mortemain to common patterns across the cron and heartbeat monitoring category, not to any single product.
The security rows above are documented in more detail on the security page.
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