Set up cron jobs online. And know when one fails.
Create a cronjob without installing anything: Cronjob.de calls your URL on schedule, to the minute.
Set up a cron job with AI: paste the instructions, we do the rest
Your hosting provider, shop or CMS hands you a text you cannot make sense of? Just paste it. We read out the address and the schedule, ask if something is missing, and fill in the form with it. You look it over and save.
- Understands hoster instructions, crontab lines and your own words
- Tells you honestly when something will not work, instead of guessing
- Nothing is saved until you click Save yourself
You can also describe just the schedule: „Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm every 15 minutes" – and the schedule is filled in for you.
Manage cron jobs with your AI assistant – Claude, ChatGPT and more
Cronjob.de speaks the Model Context Protocol, MCP for short. Connect Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor to your account and simply ask: “Which of my cron jobs failed last week?” You decide whether the assistant may only read or also change things, and you can remove the connection at any time. Included in the Unlimited plan.
External cron job – when your host offers no cron
Most web hosting plans have no cron, allow only one call per day or require SSH access. That is exactly what we are here for. The log shows you what your script answered, and you get an email when something breaks.
No cron in the hosting plan
You need no server access and install nothing. Enter the URL, pick a schedule, done.
WP-Cron only runs on visits
WordPress, TYPO3 and Shopware only run scheduled tasks when someone visits the site. We call reliably, at night too.
Your own server is overkill
For a handful of scheduled calls it makes no sense to run and maintain your own machine.
What cron jobs are used for every day
- Shops and inventory: export orders, sync stock, update prices
- Backups and maintenance: back up databases, clear caches, tidy logs
- Email and newsletters: work through queues, send reminders
- Interfaces and imports: sync data, read feeds, fetch rates
- Reports and analytics: generate and send daily and monthly reports
- Monitoring: check that the page really works
What is a cron job?
A cron job is a task that runs automatically at set times without anyone starting it – for example a backup every night or a stock sync every 5 minutes. The name comes from cron, the scheduling service on Linux servers. At Cronjob.de a cron job is a call to an address, such as https://your-shop.com/cron.php, on your schedule.
Cron syntax: the five time fields of a cron job
A cron expression has five fields separated by spaces: minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. So 0 3 * * * means “every day at 3:00”. At Cronjob.de you don't need to know the syntax: you can also click the schedule together or describe it in one sentence.
| Field | Allowed values |
|---|---|
| Minute | 0–59 |
| Hour | 0–23 |
| Day of month | 1–31 |
| Month | 1–12 or jan–dec |
| Day of week | 0–7 or sun–sat (0 and 7 = Sunday) |
Special characters
*every value,several values, e.g.1,15in day of month = on the 1st and 15th-range, e.g.1-5in day of week = Monday to Friday/step, e.g.*/15in minute = every 15 minutes
Common examples
*/5 * * * *every 5 minutes0 * * * *every hour on the hour0 3 * * *every day at 3:000 8 * * 1-5weekdays at 8:000 0 1 * *at midnight on the 1st of every month
Build a schedule: crontab generator →
All terms in the glossary →
Call log and runtime statistics: you see what your script does
A cron job that seems to run but does nothing often goes unnoticed for weeks. With us you see it right away.
Call log: you see what your script answered
For every call we store your server's response in plain text, along with duration and size: the last 20 runs per cron job, up to 5,000 characters of output, HTTP errors in plain words instead of a code.
Runtime statistics: you see when it slowly gets worse
The last 200 runs form a curve for duration and output size. That is how you spot an import that has grown from 2 to 20 seconds, long before it hits the time limit. See the example at full size
Failure alerts and monitoring: you find out before your customer calls
We report the start and the end of an outage: one message when something fails, and an all-clear when it works again.
Failure notifications for cron jobs
If your server answers with an error, you get the error message and a link to the log – by email, and on request in Slack, Discord, Teams or Telegram. Bundled, for all cron jobs or selected folders, to several recipients.
More about failure notifications · email from Plus, other channels on Unlimited
Server monitoring: is your site working – or just answering?
“200 OK” and yet the page says “Error establishing a database connection”. We check every minute whether your page really works: error pages, empty pages, texts that have to be there. Every outage is confirmed by a second server, and the AI suggests the setup.
Website monitoring: how it works · on the Unlimited plan
Your cron jobs already run? We keep watch.
Your own server, n8n or Laravel? Then your cron job checks in with us after every run – with a line like curl https://runcheck.de/…. If the check-in does not arrive, we let you know.
Cron job monitoring: how it works · 1 heartbeat free
Small price, full feature set
Automatic retry on hiccups
If your server is briefly overloaded (502, 503), we try again after 1, 5 and 15 minutes, from another one of our servers. Only if that fails too do we get in touch.
To the minute
Every minute, every second Tuesday or weekdays at 6:45. You see the next runs before you save.
Quiet hours
No alarm at night for short blips. Anything still broken afterwards is reported anyway.
Team logins
Colleagues with their own login and permissions, with a log of who changed what.
Status page
On request, a public status page for your customers, fed by your monitoring.
Running since 2003: a cron job service from Germany, GDPR data protection
Cronjob.de has been around since 2003 – one of the first web cron services there was. If you set up a task that should still be running in five years, you want to know who will be running it by then. And a cron job service sees what your systems answer: with us, where that is processed and by whom is verifiable.
How cron jobs have evolved since 2003 →
- Three locations, all in the EU – Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki on hardware of Hetzner Online GmbH. Calls are spread across independent machines; if one fails, only part of the calls is affected.
- German company – contract, support and invoicing from Germany, German law, invoice with VAT shown.
- You decide what we see – we store the last 20 responses per cron job, and you can delete them in your account at any time.
- No ad networks – no advertising trackers, no selling of data.
- Two-factor login – optional, by email code
- Renewable electricity – the data centres run on hydropower according to their operator
Pricing: pay once a year
You decide at checkout whether the plan renews automatically. When a paid plan runs out, the account simply returns to the free plan.
Free
- 5 Cronjobs
- 5-minute steps
- 45 seconds per call
- Log of the last 5 runs
Plus
- Unlimited cronjobs
- Minute-precise execution
- Call log and error email
Unlimited
- Everything from Plus
- Runtime statistics across 200 runs
- Failure alerts also in Slack, Teams, Discord or by webhook
- Server monitoring with AI setup
Every new account starts with 14 days of Unlimited, no payment details required. Afterwards it automatically continues for free. Compare all features
Set up a cron job: guides for your host, CMS and shop
Step by step, with the right address and a suitable schedule for your system.
Web hosting and Windows
Online shops
Common schedules
When something does not run
Frequently asked questions about cron jobs
What is a cron job?
Do I need my own server?
How often can a cronjob run?
What does Cronjob.de cost?
Can several people use the same account?
I have instructions from my hosting provider and do not understand them. Now what?
Can I manage my cronjobs with an AI?
Where is my data processed?
Can I see whether my script worked?
Your first cronjob runs in two minutes
Email address, password, URL, schedule. That is all it takes.