Migrate from cron-job.org

cron-job.org is a solid free URL pinger. When a job starts to matter — a billing task, a data sync, anything a customer notices when it silently stops — you usually want retries, timeout enforcement, real alerting, and an execution log you can audit. That’s the gap SteadyCron fills, with schedules defined in YAML or Terraform instead of a dashboard.

There is no export file to import, so the migration is a short manual loop.

1. List your cron-job.org jobs

In the cron-job.org console, note down for each job:

• the URL, HTTP method, and any request body
• the schedule and timezone
• custom headers (e.g. an auth token your endpoint checks)

2. Recreate each job in a manifest

steadycron manifest add job appends one job at a time to steadycron.yaml:

steadycron manifest add job --kind http --name warm-cache --schedule "*/15 * * * *"

Or write the manifest directly:

jobs:
  - id: warm-cache
    name: Warm cache
    kind: http
    method: POST
    url: https://app.example.com/tasks/warm-cache
    schedule: "*/15 * * * *"
    timezone: UTC
    retries: 3
    headers:
      Authorization: Bearer ${CRON_SECRET}   # resolved from --env-file at apply time

Then validate and apply:

steadycron validate steadycron.yaml
steadycron apply steadycron.yaml --env-file secrets.env --namespace prod

3. Run both in parallel, then switch off

Let both services call the endpoint for a day or two (make sure the task is idempotent, or stagger the schedules by a few minutes). Once the SteadyCron execution log shows green runs, disable the cron-job.org job.

What you gain

	cron-job.org	SteadyCron
Retries on failure	No	Configurable with exponential backoff
Timeout enforcement	Fixed, short	Per job, configurable
Heartbeat monitoring for your own crons	No	Yes
Alert channels	Email	Email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, webhook
Schedules in git (YAML / Terraform)	No	Yes — validate, plan, apply
Execution history	Basic	Per-run status, response, duration
Hosting	EU	EU (GDPR-native, signed DPA)

Next steps

• YAML & CLI — full manifest workflow
• HTTP jobs — request builder, retries, timeouts
• Alerting — route failures to the right channel