Serverless cron jobs

How to run cron jobs in a serverless app

Serverless platforms are great for request-driven apps, but recurring background work is awkward because your application usually cannot keep a process alive. Scheduled webhooks solve that problem by moving the clock outside your deployment.

The actual problem

Most developers do not need help understanding cron syntax. The problem is that Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, and similar platforms are designed around short-lived request handlers. You can respond to HTTP traffic, but you generally cannot run a persistent worker loop like arq, Celery, Sidekiq, or a traditional Linux cron daemon inside the app.

That creates friction for ordinary product features: weekly digests, hourly data syncs, expired session cleanup, report generation, trial expiration, delayed billing checks, and customer-specific reminders.

The scheduled webhook pattern

Instead of running cron inside your app, expose an authenticated API endpoint and let an external scheduler call it on a recurring schedule.

# Create a job that calls your API every hour
curl -X POST https://api.croncoco.io/jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer coco_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"hourly-sync","cron_expression":"0 * * * *","webhook_url":"https://your-app.com/api/sync"}'

Your app stays serverless. CronCoco stores the schedule, fires the webhook, records execution history, and applies plan limits for execution volume, timeout, burst, and concurrency.

When platform cron is enough

Built-in platform cron can be the right answer if you have a small number of static schedules that rarely change. For example, one nightly cleanup endpoint or one daily digest endpoint may not need a separate service.

When an API-first scheduler is better

Your app needs to create schedules dynamically for users, tenants, or integrations.
You want to pause, update, inspect, or delete schedules from your backend.
You want webhook payloads, custom headers, failure notifications, and execution history available through an API.
You do not want cron schedules tied to deploy configuration.

Next steps

If you are building on Vercel, read the Vercel cron alternative guide. If you need schedules created from product data, read the dynamic cron jobs in Next.js guide.

Ready to try it? Create a free CronCoco account or jump into the Create job API docs.