5 ms·
To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for MAILTO=user@domain.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs.
by guylhem 14y ago
To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for MAILTO=user@domain.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs.
The right price is the price your target consumers are willing to pay. And if like another commenter you are doing to build it yourself instead of forking $19, you obviously are not the consumer. (and neither am I - I'll stick to cron :-) !)
- r38y 14y agoThank's for pointing out that price != cost. The value of the service is in not having to ever panic again when checking the backups during an emergency. It is very easy to be notified when something happens (for example, MAILTO in cron) but it's hard to know when something DOESN'T happen, especially if you work on a lot of sites. There are plenty of ways to be notified when something doesn't happen if you are willing to use a little elbow grease... we use one of them to make sure DMS itself is working properly.
- StavrosK 14y agoAs the creator and owner of deadmansswitch.net, I hate you :P
- cheap 14y agoI know a lot of designers that will love and support this product.
- alxndr 14y agoI've used one-line cron scripts that capture output of a command, check it, and if it doesn't look like what it should, sends me an email.
- scottyallen 14y agoI run a business(appmonsta.com) that relies heavily on a whole bunch of various periodic processes running when they should. I'd easily pay $19 to worry less at night about whether everything ran like it should have. I'm not sure whether Dead Man's Snitch would alleviate my worry, but the pain strong enough to justify the price point for me. What I will say is that I probably would want to be able to set up 3-5 snitches before I'd feel comfortable committing to setting a bunch more up, which incidentally, is also the point I'd be willing to start paying money.
- 6ren 14y agoWith 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."