Vercel Cron Jobs
Cron-triggered HTTP GET requests to Vercel Functions in a production deployment.
- Card required
- No
Vercel Cron Jobs scores 7.8/10 for free value in Schedulers. The main constraint: Available on all Vercel plans; Hobby scheduling limits and function limits apply.
Free value score
7.8 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
Configured in vercel.json
Triggers Vercel Functions
Good when the app is already on Vercel
Gotchas
- 100 cron jobs per project
Hobby plan allows up to 100 cron jobs per project, which resets as projects are managed.
- Once-per-day execution limit
On the Hobby plan, each cron job can run at most once per day; any cron expression that resolves to more frequent than daily will fail at deployment.
- ±59 min scheduling imprecision
Hobby plan offers only hourly scheduling precision — a job set for 01:00 UTC may fire anywhere between 01:00 and 01:59 UTC.
- No sub-daily or per-minute schedules
Sub-daily intervals (hourly, every 30 min, etc.) are unavailable on Hobby; Pro/Enterprise is required for per-minute precision and higher frequency.
- UTC timezone only
Cron schedules always execute in UTC; there is no per-job timezone configuration available on any plan.
- HTTP GET trigger only
Cron jobs trigger Vercel Functions via HTTP GET to a production deployment URL; arbitrary shell commands or containers are not supported.
- Production deployment only
Cron jobs only invoke the production deployment path, not preview or development environments.
- Vercel Functions runtime limits apply
Each cron invocation is subject to Vercel Function execution time, memory, and payload limits (Hobby: up to 300s / 5 min max duration).
- Vercel-hosted apps only
Cron jobs are tightly coupled to Vercel deployments and cannot be used to trigger external non-Vercel endpoints as a standalone scheduler.
Sources
-
"Hobby | 100 cron jobs | Once per day | Hourly (±59 min)"
https://vercel.com/docs/cron-jobs/usage-and-pricing -
"Daily execution limit: Cron jobs can only run once per day. Expressions like 0 * * * * (hourly) or */30 * * * * (every 30 minutes) will fail deployment"
https://vercel.com/docs/cron-jobs/usage-and-pricing -
"Invocations | 1 million included ... Hobby includes 1 million invocations per month"
https://vercel.com/docs/functions/usage-and-pricing -
"On September 30, 2025, Vercel raised a $300M oversubscribed Series F co-led by Accel and GIC at a $9.3B post-money valuation"
https://sacra.com/c/vercel/
