The dead-man's switch

Most alerting tells you when something happens. The failure that actually bites is the one that makes no noise: the cron that died three weeks ago, the backup that silently stopped, the agent that stalled mid-run. Fresh Jots emails you when a write stops landing — and the log it watches is a note you can read on your phone.

How it works

Your job already writes its heartbeat — one curl per run, appended to a note named after the job. The first call creates the note; every call after adds a line:

curl -X POST https://freshjots.com/api/v1/notes/by-filename/nightly-backup/append \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FRESHJOTS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"backup ok 2026-06-10 03:15"}'

Then set the expected interval on that note — from the note's settings page, or in the same API call that creates it:

curl -X PATCH https://freshjots.com/api/v1/notes/by-filename/nightly-backup \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FRESHJOTS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"note":{"append_deadline_hours":26,"alert_email":"ops@example.com"}}'

That's the whole setup. If 26 hours pass without a write, Fresh Jots emails you. When the writes resume, the switch re-arms on its own. No agent to install, no ping URL to remember, no extra service in your stack.

The alert and the log are the same artifact

A bare ping monitor can tell you that the job stopped. The note can tell you what it was doing when it stopped — because the heartbeat lines your job has been appending are the history you debug from. Open the note from the alert email and the last successful run, its output, and the gap are all right there, readable on your phone from anywhere.

Anything that runs unattended is a candidate: cron jobs, CI pipelines, deploy hooks, queue workers, scrapers, autonomous agents that should be checking in between runs. One note per job, one append per run, one deadline each.

Included in Dev — not a metered add-on

The dead-man's switch ships with the Dev plan ($15/month), alongside the REST API, HMAC-signed outbound webhooks, and MCP for your AI — on every note, with no per-check pricing. The Team plan routes the same alerts team-wide with one-click acknowledgement.

New accounts get a 14-day Dev API trial — long enough to wire a real job to a real deadline and watch the switch arm itself before you pay anything.

Start free See pricing Everything else for developers →