Blog · Webhooks
Webhook integrations and scheduled trigger patterns
Webhooks are the digital messengers between services. These posts cover how to trigger them on a real schedule with Crontap, plus the patterns for Make, Zapier, GitHub Actions and beyond.
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Webhooks
Webhooks shine in one direction: when something happens here, tell something there. Cron is the opposite direction: when the clock says so, fire here. Pair them and you get cadence-driven workflows: every minute fire a Make webhook to push the latest Airtable rows into the warehouse; every 5 minutes ping a Zapier catch hook to fan out a notification; every hour workflow_dispatch a GitHub Action because GitHub's own schedule event drifts by 15+ minutes under load.
Crontap fires the webhook on real cron syntax, per-IANA timezone, with custom headers and JSON payloads, retries on 5xx, and failure alerts to Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or another webhook. The posts below cover the primer on webhooks themselves, the Make and Zapier integrations end-to-end, the every-minute pattern, and the GitHub Actions drift workaround.
Blog on Webhooks
5 items- Guides
Make webhook every minute: trigger Make scenarios on any cadence via external cron
Make's Schedule trigger costs an operation per fire even when the scenario does nothing. A 5-minute scenario costs 8,640 ops/month before any real work runs. Here is how to drop the internal schedule, swap to a Custom Webhook, and fire it from Crontap on any cadence.
- Comparisons
Why GitHub Actions cron misses and what to use instead
GitHub Actions cron is free and right next to your code, but GitHub itself documents that schedule events 'may be delayed during high load'. Here is the on-time pattern teams use: workflow_dispatch + external cron + retries.
- Technology
A primer on Webhooks: Empowering Connections
Webhooks are the digital messengers that deliver real-time updates and data between applications, enabling seamless integration and automation. With webhooks, you can stay updated, take immediate action, and build intelligent event-driven systems.
- Guides
Integrate Crontap schedules with Make.com Webhooks
Learn how to use Crontap webhook schedules to integrate with Make.com and thousands of apps: sms, email, telegram, airtable, slack, teams, twitter or your own custom webhook e.g. a cloud function.
- Guides
Use Zapier with Crontap schedules to get access to thousands of apps
Use Crontap webhook schedules to integrate with Zapier and thousands of apps: slack, teams, airtable, sms, email, twitter, telegram or your own custom webhooks such as your own cloud functions.
Related on Crontap
The same Webhooks topic, from other angles.
FAQ
Common questions on Webhooks
- Webhook vs cron job. What's the difference?
- A webhook is an HTTP request fired from one service to another in response to an event. A cron job is an HTTP request fired on a schedule. Pair them: a Crontap schedule fires the webhook on the cadence you want, the receiving service does the work.
- How is firing a Make webhook from Crontap different from Make's built-in schedule?
- Make's schedule charges per-operation and floors at cadences that depend on the plan. Crontap fires the Make webhook on real cron syntax (per-IANA timezone, 1-minute floor on Pro), so the scenario runs on the cadence you actually need with one round-trip per fire.
- GitHub Actions cron drifts. Can a webhook fix that?
- Yes, by switching to workflow_dispatch. Crontap fires a POST to the workflow_dispatch API on time, and the workflow runs without GitHub's schedule-event throttling. The dedicated post walks the auth and the workflow YAML.
- How do I secure the webhook endpoint?
- A shared-secret header check on the receiving side. Crontap sends configurable custom headers per schedule, so a long random token in the schedule header and the same value in the receiver's env var keeps drive-by traffic out.
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