Question 1

Is there a free plan?

Accepted Answer

Yes. CronJobPro offers a Free plan alongside Starter, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Each plan caps the number of active jobs, the number of daily runs, and the minimum allowed schedule interval, with higher plans allowing more.

Question 2

How do I create my first job?

Accepted Answer

In the dashboard, add a target URL and HTTP method, then set a schedule as either a 5-field cron expression or a simple interval. You can also set a per-job timezone, optional request headers and body, a timeout, retries, and an overlap policy.

Question 3

How does CronJobPro decide if a run succeeded or failed?

Accepted Answer

On schedule, CronJobPro sends the HTTP request from its servers and treats any 2xx response as a success. A non-2xx status, a timeout, a connection error, or a DNS failure counts as a failed execution, which then triggers retries and alerts.

Question 4

What is the minimum interval between runs?

Accepted Answer

The shortest allowed interval depends on your plan's minimum schedule interval. Free and lower tiers have a higher minimum, while higher plans allow more frequent runs.

Question 5

Can I use cron expressions or just simple intervals?

Accepted Answer

Both are supported. You can define a schedule with a standard 5-field cron expression or with a simple interval, whichever fits your job best.

Question 6

What timezone are my jobs scheduled in?

Accepted Answer

Each job has its own timezone, and the schedule is evaluated in that timezone. CronJobPro keeps your local clock time stable across daylight-saving transitions, so a 09:00 daily job stays 09:00 local; choose UTC to avoid DST ambiguity.

Question 7

Why is my job not running?

Accepted Answer

Common causes are hitting your plan's daily-run cap (further runs are skipped that day) or active-job cap, a schedule too frequent for your plan's minimum interval, or the job being paused. A job can also be auto-disabled by the circuit breaker after persistent failures.

Question 8

How do retries work?

Accepted Answer

When an execution fails, CronJobPro retries it up to your configured maximum using your chosen strategy: exponential, linear, or fixed. Retries are durable and survive platform restarts, and you are alerted after retries are exhausted.

Question 9

What happens if a run is still in progress when the next one is due?

Accepted Answer

That depends on your overlap policy. With the skip policy, CronJobPro skips the new run if the previous one is still in flight; with allow, both can run concurrently.

Question 10

How do I monitor a job I run myself?

Accepted Answer

Use a heartbeat (dead-man's-switch) monitor, which gives you a unique ping URL at https://cronjobpro.com/ping/. Your own job calls it on success, and you can also report failures via /ping//fail or /ping//exitcode/; if no successful ping arrives within the expected period plus grace window, CronJobPro alerts you.

Question 11

What is the circuit breaker?

Accepted Answer

After persistent failures, the circuit breaker auto-disables a job to stop hammering a broken endpoint. It then periodically probes the endpoint (half-open) and automatically re-enables the job once the endpoint recovers.

Question 12

Can I avoid alerts on a single flaky failure?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Set an alert threshold so failure alerts are suppressed until N consecutive failures occur. The default is 1, which alerts on the first failure.

Question 13

Do you support Slack and Discord?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Under Settings → Notifications you can add Slack (via an Incoming Webhook URL) and Discord (via a webhook URL). Other channels include email, generic webhooks, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Microsoft Teams, plus an in-app notification bell.

Question 14

How do I call the API?

Accepted Answer

CronJobPro has a REST API authenticated with an API key sent in the X-Api-Key request header. Create and manage keys under Settings → API Keys, where you can also add an optional IP allowlist using CIDR ranges; endpoints let you list, create, get, update, delete, and 'Run now' jobs.

Question 15

How do I verify that a webhook came from CronJobPro?

Accepted Answer

Outgoing webhook notifications can be signed with your shared secret using HMAC-SHA256. To verify, recompute the HMAC over the raw request body and compare it in constant time against the signature header.

Question 16

Are my request headers and secrets stored securely?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Request headers you configure on a job are stored encrypted at rest. API keys can additionally be restricted to specific IP ranges via a CIDR allowlist.

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