render-cron-jobs

A guide to scheduled jobs on Render, a cloud platform for running applications. A cron job starts a command at set times, runs until the work finishes, and then exits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write cron expressions, configure Render cron services or render.yaml files, migrate from Heroku Scheduler, choose a job type, or troubleshoot a schedule that does not run.
Why use it?
It clarifies how scheduled jobs differ from always-running workers, including UTC schedules, one-run-at-a-time behavior, time limits, storage limits, and billing implications.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/render-oss/render-plugin-claude-code/render-cron-jobs
Any agent
npx skills add render-oss/render-plugin-claude-code --skill render-cron-jobs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/render-oss/render-plugin-claude-code

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,381 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00093 $0.01381
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00691
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00276
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00138

Measured 2d ago against content hash 19c2e2986049, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

render-cron-jobs scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to render-cron-jobs — 4 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/render-cron-jobs/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Render Cron Jobs

This skill covers Cron Job services on Render: how schedules run, what the platform guarantees, and how they differ from workers and workflows. Pair it with Blueprint and deploy skills when authoring render.yaml or Dashboard settings.

When to Use

  • Scheduled work that starts on a cron, runs a command, and exits when finished
  • Choosing between cron, background worker, or workflow for periodic or long-running jobs
  • Blueprint fields for type: cron, schedule, and commands
  • Constraints: no disk, single concurrent run, 12-hour max duration, private-network outbound only
  • UTC scheduling pitfalls (expressions are not local time)

Expression cheat sheets, framework startCommand examples, and Heroku Scheduler migration mapping live under references/.

Configuration

  • Schedule: a cron expression evaluated in UTC, not the team’s local timezone. All times in the Dashboard and Blueprints are UTC.
  • Command: any valid Linux shell command or bash script path. The process must exit when work is done—billing is based on run duration (prorated by the second).
  • Source:
    • Git repository — Render builds on push (same deploy model as other repo-backed services); the built artifact runs on each scheduled invocation.
    • Prebuilt Docker image — the image is pulled before each run and is not retained between runs (no warm cache of the image layer set across invocations in the same way as a long-lived service).

Constraints

  • No persistent disk — cron job services cannot provision or attach Render persistent disks; plan for object storage or databases instead.
  • Single-run guarantee — at most one active run per cron service at a time. A new scheduled tick does not start a second overlapping instance.
  • Maximum run length: 12 hours per invocation.
  • Pricing: $1/month minimum per cron job service; usage is prorated by the second beyond plan/minimum rules that apply to your account.
  • Private network: cron jobs can send traffic to other services on the private network; they cannot receive inbound private-network connections (no internal hostname for accepting traffic from other services).

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 110 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 19c2e2986049

Subscribe to this mod's changes

render-cron-jobs is a skill published in the GitHub repository render-oss/render-plugin-claude-code (0 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,381 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to render-cron-jobs, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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