Use case
Scheduled Telegram bot messages.
Telegram bots react. They do not schedule. For daily reminders, weekly digests, community pings and on-call rotations, Crontap is the external clock that fires the bot's send endpoint on a real cron.
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The problem
Why this is painful without the right tool
- Telegram has no native scheduler for bot messages; bots fire when somebody talks to them or when an external trigger fires.
- Self-hosted bots that own their own clock crash silently when the host reboots; messages stop.
- BotFather has no scheduling primitive of its own; the only path is a custom backend with an in-process scheduler.
- Multi-chat fan-out (the same daily digest to multiple group chats) is awkward to encode inside one bot.
The fix
How Crontap solves it
Build a small backend endpoint that calls the Telegram Bot API sendMessage for the chat IDs you care about. Let Crontap fire it on the cadence and timezone that fits the chat. Failures alert to email / webhook (Slack / Discord / Telegram, ideally a different chat).
0 8 * * *The cleanest pattern is a backend route like /telegram/send?chat=team-engineering that knows the chat ID, the bot token, and the message template. Crontap fires the URL on the cron; the backend hits Telegram Bot API. Bot token stays server-side; Crontap only knows the backend bearer header.
For multi-chat fan-out, one Crontap schedule per chat per cadence is the simplest pattern. Each schedule has its own URL parameter or its own dedicated route. The dashboard shows them side by side.
FAQ
Common questions
- Does Crontap call Telegram Bot API directly?
- It can, but the cleaner pattern is a backend route in between. Crontap can paste the bot token in an Authorization header and hit api.telegram.org directly; most teams prefer the indirection because it keeps the token out of the scheduler and lets the backend handle template rendering.
- What's the shortest interval Crontap supports?
- Every 1 minute on paid plans. Free tier available for slower cadences. Most Telegram schedules run at every hour, daily, or weekly; minute cadence shows up for live-event pings rather than digest content.
- How do I avoid spamming a chat?
- Crontap fires on the cadence you set; if you set every minute, Telegram receives every minute. For dedup at the message level, the backend should return early when the same content was already sent recently. For one-shot sends (a Friday recap), set the cron to fire only on Friday at the right time.
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