Google Cloud Scheduler
Fully managed cron service for invoking HTTP endpoints, Pub/Sub topics, and Google Cloud workloads.
- Card required
- Yes
Google Cloud Scheduler scores 6.1/10 for free value in Schedulers. The main constraint: Google Cloud includes limited free usage in some cases, but billing/project setup and current pricing must be verified.
Free value score
6.1 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
Managed cron jobs
HTTP and Pub/Sub targets
Retries and cloud-native auth
Gotchas
- 3 free jobs per billing account/month
Each Google Cloud billing account gets exactly 3 free Scheduler jobs per month; additional jobs cost $0.10/job/month.
- Free quota is account-level, not per-project
The 3 free jobs are shared across all projects on the billing account, so a multi-project setup quickly exhausts the free allowance.
- Billing account required
A Google Cloud billing account with a valid payment method must be set up before using Cloud Scheduler, even within the free tier.
- No built-in job history or long retention
Cloud Scheduler free tier does not include extended execution history or alerting dashboards beyond what Cloud Logging provides.
- Executions per job not individually billed but may be throttled
Billing is per job definition, not per execution, but individual job execution frequency is bounded by minimum 1-minute intervals.
Sources
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"Each Google billing account gets 3 jobs per month free. Note that the free tier is measured at the account level not the project level."
https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/pricing -
"A job is not billed for individual executions. A job is billed $0.10/job/31 days, which is $0.003 per day for each billable job."
https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/pricing -
"Read API requests per minute ... 1250 | Write API requests per minute ... 500 | Number of jobs (per region) | Default: 1000 Max: 5000 | Fixed maximum job size (payload) | 1 MB total including ~1 KB request overhead"
https://docs.cloud.google.com/scheduler/quotas -
"Job duration ... The maximum duration (from start time to end time) for a job execution with an HTTP target ... 30 minutes"
https://docs.cloud.google.com/scheduler/quotas