Compare / Dead Man's Snitch
norc vs Dead Man's Snitch
Dead Man's Snitch is the simplest tool on this table: a snitch URL you curl at the end of a job, and an alert if it doesn't show up. That simplicity is the whole pitch, and at $5/mo for three snitches it's cheap to start. It has no concept of editing the job that pings it, and no view across machines — norc's fleet and remote-edit capabilities sit a layer above what a snitch is designed to do.
| norc | Dead Man's Snitch | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes · 1 snitch |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8/mo · 5 machines | $5/mo · 3 snitches |
| Value metric | flat tier by machine count | per snitch |
| Jobs per machine | Unlimited | Billed per snitch |
| Reliability & security | ||
| Jobs keep running if the vendor is down | ✓ real cron runs them | n/a · monitors only |
| Needs inbound access or your SSH keys | No · outbound agent | No · receives pings |
| Preserves hand-edited crontab lines | ✓ only touches its own | n/a · never edits |
| Platform | ||
| Native apps | Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI | iOS |
| Monitoring | ||
| Cron-job failure / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerting channels | Many | Many |
| Self-host / on-prem | Desktop agent | — |
| Management | ||
| Remotely edit & write cron jobs on your machines | ✓ | — |
| AI / natural-language job creation | ✓ | — |
| Multi-machine fleet management | ✓ | — |
Native apps: Competitor app availability checked against vendor sites and app stores in August 2026. “Web only” means no official native app was found at that time; third-party website wrappers are not counted.
Dead Man's Snitch starts at $5/mo · 3 snitches. norc charges a flat tier by machine count instead of per monitor, with unlimited jobs on each machine — see norc pricing.
norc vs Dead Man's Snitch: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than Dead Man's Snitch?
- Dead Man's Snitch's cheapest paid plan is $5/mo · 3 snitches; norc's is $8/mo · 5 machines. The two use different pricing units, so it depends on your fleet: norc charges a flat tier by machine count with unlimited jobs on each machine, rather than per monitor or per check.
- Can Dead Man's Snitch edit cron jobs on my servers?
- Dead Man's Snitch: —. norc: yes. This is the main difference between the two. Monitoring tools tell you a job failed; norc writes the real crontab on each paired machine, so you can add, change, or remove jobs without opening inbound ports.
- Does Dead Man's Snitch have native desktop or mobile apps?
- Dead Man's Snitch: iOS. norc: Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI. Most tools in this category are web dashboards only, which matters when a job fails overnight and you want to fix it from a phone rather than find a laptop.
- Do my scheduled jobs keep running if Dead Man's Snitch goes down?
- Dead Man's Snitch: n/a · monitors only. norc: real cron runs them. norc never becomes the thing that runs your jobs — the system cron daemon on your own machine does. A norc outage costs you visibility and remote editing, not execution.
- Should I use Dead Man's Snitch instead of norc?
- For a handful of jobs where all you need is a dead-simple ping-or-alert and you don't want to learn a new dashboard, Dead Man's Snitch's minimalism is a genuine feature, not a limitation.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.