Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

Also, it knows absolutely nothing about your services and doesn't require any level of access. All you do is ping it.

Just some questions:

- how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip?

- why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me).

- why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches?

I like the singular focus. Some people don't want very complicated feature rich monitor systems. I can imagine using a solution like this, esspecially in those cases, where more feature rich monitor systems are not being considered.

Yet, you offer a pricing model that suggests something completely different. That you are a very complicated feature-rich monitor system. The value you provide at each price point is simply not warranted.

I doubt this will have a large uptake, but if it does, i'm the first one tempted to compete. The required architecture is not complicated enough to warrant such high margins on such low costs. Cloud providers, even the budget ones like DigitalOcean, could easily offer something like this for free to their customers.

Now, you could argue that the price includes high quality support. But that's the not the audience of such a singular focus tool. If i need support, i'm obviously spending enough time interacting with it, that i would be better off with a more feature-rich monitor system. (which are available at similar price points)

Who's going to pay 600 dollars a year for 300 snitches? To build this at scale may take more effort, but from the perspective of your customer .. wouldn't most of them be able to build something like this for internal use in a single day? There are open source solutions with more features you can install with a single command.

I'm just wondering: but wouldn't you have much more customers, and hence, more profit, if you would provide 500 snitches at 100 dollars a year? Or alternatively, offer the service for free, but just charge for the apps yearly? In the end, a single snitch will do at most 24 empty GET requests a day, where you store a timestamp. A single VPS should be able to handle 10k snitches easily. (less than 3 requests per second)