Use case
External cron for Cloudflare Workers when Cron Triggers fall short.
Cloudflare Cron Triggers are great when one Worker owns one schedule. The pain shows up at scale: per-Worker config in wrangler.toml, no central dashboard, free-plan subrequest limits. Crontap is the external clock that calls any Worker URL from outside.
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The problem
Why this is painful without the right tool
- 1-minute minimum on Cron Triggers; sub-minute is not addressable on either side, but the per-Worker config feels heavy for simple HTTP triggers.
- Configuration lives in wrangler.toml per Worker, so cadence changes ship through a wrangler deploy.
- Subrequest limits on the free Workers plan can cap what a Cron Trigger can do; an external trigger sidesteps the budget when the work is small.
- Multi-Worker accounts have no central schedule view; you click through Workers in the Cloudflare dashboard to audit.
The fix
How Crontap solves it
Crontap hits your Worker URL (https://your-worker.your-account.workers.dev) at any cadence in any IANA timezone, from outside Cloudflare. No wrangler.toml change for a cadence flip; the schedule lives in Crontap. Wrap behind an auth header that your fetch handler verifies on every run. Failures alert to email / webhook (Slack / Discord / Telegram).
*/5 * * * *For multi-Worker setups, one Crontap schedule per Worker per cadence keeps the dashboard organized. Each schedule has its own URL, its own cadence, its own failure alert. Pause the staging schedule when staging is asleep; let the production schedule run undisturbed.
Auth is whatever your Worker expects. Crontap stores arbitrary headers per schedule and sends them on every run. For a Worker that fronts a sensitive resource, the standard pattern is a bearer header check at the top of the fetch handler.
FAQ
Common questions
- Can I still use Cron Triggers alongside Crontap?
- Yes. Mix freely. Keep Cron Triggers for in-Worker logic that needs to run in the Worker isolate (a cache warm, a Durable Object refresh). Use Crontap for top-level triggers and for everything where you want central alerting and the schedule out of wrangler.toml.
- What's the shortest interval Crontap supports?
- Every 1 minute on paid plans. Free tier available for slower cadences. Cloudflare Cron Triggers are also 1-minute minimum; the difference is the dashboard and the cadence-change story.
- How do I get notified if a run fails?
- Wire failure alerts to email / webhook (Slack / Discord / Telegram) on the schedule's Integrations panel. The failure payload includes the run's status code, duration, and response body, so a Worker that returned 500 because of a subrequest limit shows up in the alert.
Related guides
Ready to fix it?
Point Crontap at any URL. Pick any cron. Done.
WordPress, Shopify, Railway, Cloud Run, Vercel, HubSpot, Ghost, your own box. If it answers HTTP, Crontap can drive it on a clock you can read, in the timezone that actually matters, and page you when something breaks.
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/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1
Schedule
"every 5 minutes"
Next
in 23s