Use case
Fire Zapier Catch Hooks on any cadence, without burning Zapier tasks.
Zapier's Schedule trigger uses one of your paid Zapier tasks per invocation. Crontap is zero tasks per invocation. Keep Zapier as the workflow brain; let Crontap be the clock.
Free plan · no credit card required
The problem
Why this is painful without the right tool
- Zapier Schedule charges one task per run; at every minute that is 43,200 tasks a month, before the Zap itself does any actual work.
- Plan-gated cadence: Starter is 15-minute minimum, even though most automation patterns want every minute or every 5 minutes.
- There is no central view across scheduled Zaps; each scheduled trigger lives inside its own Zap and you click through the editor to audit cron.
- Zapier Schedule still has the 'sometimes triggers fire late' caveat in its own docs, which is a real liability for billing or notification jobs.
The fix
How Crontap solves it
Create a Catch Hook in Zapier and copy the webhook URL. Paste into Crontap and pick a cron. The Zap fires every time Crontap calls the webhook, with the payload Crontap sends. The tasks consumed inside the Zap stay the same; the scheduling is free, and the cadence floor is every 1 minute on paid Crontap plans.
*/5 * * * *One concrete pattern from the dataset: a Zapier-anchored operations team running a 5-minute trigger that pulls a Sheet row, sends a Slack ping, and updates an Airtable status. Inside Zapier the Zap consumes 3 tasks per run (one per step); the schedule itself is no longer one of those tasks because Crontap is firing the Catch Hook, not Zapier Schedule. Across a month at minute cadence, the savings on the schedule task alone covers a Crontap Pro plan many times over.
For the head-to-head decision frame, pricing math, and a migration playbook from Zapier Schedule, see Crontap vs Zapier Schedule. There is also an existing walkthrough in Use Zapier with Crontap schedules for the click-by-click setup.
Auth is whatever you tell Zapier to expect. The Catch Hook URL is a long random string by default; if that is enough, paste it into Crontap and you are done. If you want a shared secret check, add a header in Crontap and verify it with a Code by Zapier step at the top of the Zap.
FAQ
Common questions
- Does this break Zapier?
- No. Zapier sees a normal webhook call from a known URL and runs the Zap exactly as it would for any other Catch Hook trigger. The only thing that changes is who is firing the webhook (Crontap, not Zapier Schedule).
- Which plan do I need in Zapier?
- Any plan that has webhooks, starting at Starter. Catch Hooks are a Webhooks by Zapier feature, so make sure Webhooks is enabled on your plan. The Crontap side does not change Zapier's webhook gating; it only changes who calls the webhook.
- Can Crontap send a payload?
- Yes. Paste a JSON body into the schedule's payload field and Crontap sends it on every run. The Zap's Catch Hook step receives the payload as input, so you can drive a multi-step Zap with whatever shape you need (a row ID, a customer email, a date range to query).
- What's the shortest interval Crontap supports?
- Every 1 minute on paid plans. Free tier available for slower cadences. The minimum-cadence story is the headline reason customers move scheduling out of Zapier; Starter Schedule's 15-minute minimum is a real product gap that an external clock fills.
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.
Free forever tier ・ No credit card required
/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1
Schedule
"every 5 minutes"
Next
in 23s