Heartbeat
The dead-man's switch watches a log for hours or days. Heartbeat watches a source minute by minute: a website, a server, a worker, a box in a client's rack. It pings a secret URL; when the pings stop, Fresh Jots tells you — and writes the outage into a note that cannot be edited, moved or deleted.
How it works
Your account comes with a Heartbeats folder holding
heartbeat_log_1 … heartbeat_log_N,
one slot per source. Open Settings → Heartbeats, switch a slot on, and copy its ping URL into
the source — a crontab line is enough:
* * * * * curl -fsS https://freshjots.com/hb/<your-token> >/dev/nullGET or POST, no headers, no body. Fresh Jots checks every slot once a minute. Two silent minutes and you get an email — and a JSON webhook, if you set one on the slot. While the silence lasts the report repeats every nine minutes. The first ping afterwards clears it on its own.
The record is the proof
Nothing but the checker ever writes into a heartbeat note, and it writes only three kinds of line, all in UTC:
DAY|260930
ON|260930-03-00-00
OFF|260930-03-17-00
ON|260930-03-41-00
DAY|261001
DAY once per day the slot was on,
OFF the minute the source was found silent,
ON the minute it was heard again. A year of a quiet server
is a few hundred bytes; a year of a flaky one is still small enough to read on a phone.
Every line is hashed into the note's chain, timestamped, and folded into the nightly Bitcoin anchor like every other append-only note. The notes themselves are permanent: no rename, no move, no delete, always append-only. So the gaps in the record are evidence — for an SLA dispute, a hosting bill, or your own memory of that night.
Slots per plan
- Personal — 1 slot.
- Dev — 25 slots.
- Team — 25 slots per seat, shared by the workspace, reporting to the team's alert destination.
- 14-day API trial — 10 slots while the trial runs; the notes stay afterwards, the slots switch off.
Slots start off, so an unused one never pages you. A plan change never removes a note or switches a running slot off; it only decides how many slots you can switch on.