Why Mortise
The job is simple. Most tools make the report the product.
One-shot checkers forget
Paste a URL, get a dump of every dead link, close the tab. Next month you run it again and re-read the same 404s. There is no memory of what was already broken.
Desktop suites are a wall
Full SEO spiders are excellent for audits. Their free tiers often stop at a few hundred URLs, and the paid license is priced for professionals who live in that UI. If you only need recurring link health on a site you own, that is the wrong tool.
Per-URL monitors bill for lists you know
Submitting individual URLs and paying per slot works for a handful of critical pages. It does not replace a crawl that discovers links from your own HTML.
What Mortise does instead
You prove ownership. The first crawl is a silent baseline. Later crawls mark a link newly broken only after two consecutive final 404 or 410 responses. Timeouts, 429s, and 5xx stay “unavailable” and do not page you. Bodies are not stored — only statuses and transitions.