Schedule API calls with cron — automate any endpoint

# /etc/crontab on a Linux box
*/15 * * * * curl -fsS -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_SECRET" \
  https://api.example.com/cron/heartbeat

Cheapest and simplest, but you own:

• The host (uptime, OS patches, SSL).
• Retry logic when the API is briefly unavailable.
• Alerting when the request fails silently.
• Logs / observability across every cron line.
• Timezone configuration.

Works great for hobby projects and a single shared box. Falls apart at the “hundreds of crons across multiple services” scale.

If your API runs on AWS or Vercel, the platform's cron service is often the path of least resistance.

• AWS EventBridge Scheduler — invokes Lambda, Step Functions, ECS, or arbitrary HTTP endpoints (via API destinations). Supports IANA timezones, dead-letter queues, retries. Cron syntax guide.
• Vercel cron — invokes a Next.js API route on schedule. UTC only, no built-in retry beyond function cold-start handling. Cron syntax guide.
• Cloudflare Workers Cron Triggers — fires a Worker on a cron expression. Great for edge-cron use cases.

If you already run a queue (BullMQ, Sidekiq, Celery, RabbitMQ), most of them have a sibling library that adds cron scheduling on top:

• BullMQ + repeat: { cron: "*/5 * * * *" }
• sidekiq-cron — durable cron schedules in Sidekiq.
• Celery beat — cron- and interval-style schedules in Celery.

Pros: durable across restarts, distributed across workers, tight integration with your existing job processing. Cons: you still own the infrastructure.

Crontap is a managed scheduler purpose-built for HTTP endpoints. Drop a URL, drop a cron expression, get scheduled invocations with:

• Configurable retries with exponential backoff.
• Bearer-token / HMAC auth out of the box.
• Timezone-aware schedules.
• Per-call logs and a calendar view of upcoming runs.
• REST API for programmatic schedule creation.
• Webhook delivery to Slack / Discord / email on failure.

Worth it when you have more than ~10 schedules, when reliability matters more than the savings of running cron on a box, or when business stakeholders need to manage schedules without code changes.

• Heartbeat / health check — every 5 min: */5 * * * *.
• Cache warm-up — every 15 min: */15 * * * *.
• Daily digest email — weekdays at 09:00: 0 9 * * 1-5.
• Monthly invoice run — last day of month: 0 0 L * *.
• Quarterly report — first of Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct: 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 *.
• Hourly cleanup — 0 * * * *.