[martinkallstrom]

Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service.

Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would be possible to build a SaaS that people feel is easier to use and more flexible than cron. I would easily pay a few dollars a month for a simple reliable cron service. Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.

[davidjgraph]

> Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.

Then that sounds like it need a serious full time commitment. The OP seems to be looking for a specific category of ideas that require minimal maintenance, rather than any ideas.

[rmc]

100% uptime is impossible. Remember you can get 99% uptime (2 nines) if you're down for 4 days in a year.

[martinkallstrom]

"Never ever" is at least two nines.. perhaps three. 4 days of consecutive downtime would probably hurt a Cron as a service-service a lot in terms of user happiness.

[josscrowcroft]

I use Pingdom's 1-minute monitoring for this, which is included on the Free plan. No joke, it hits up my pseudo-cron Task Processing route which fires up and reschedules all tasks needing doing, and it never fails. And it provides uptime and failure reports on my scheduled tasks!

[wojt_eu]

never underestimate the power of duct tape

[autoreverse]

My weekend project from 2009 does this: http://www.crondroid.com/

One free daily cron, others paid on request (please use the contact form).

500 subscriber crons per day. We use it for in-house and client projects so have an interest in reliability ;-)

Accounts/dashboard/self-service will be added if/when needed (currently email does the trick).

All comments appreciated.

[davidmat]

http://webcron.org/ does this

[adventured]

I use one of these for various side tasks, because I got sick of having to run cron jobs for servers that I might switch between or kill off, and I run a lot of cron jobs. I also like the idea of offloading the cron hits to an independent service, so my servers focus strictly on more important tasks.

http://cronless.com

It's the first one I found that I liked and was reliable. It's very modestly priced as well.

I wouldn't suggest this for passive income however, as cron is a very low cost, value added type product. It's difficult to charge much for it stand-alone. You'd want to bundle a suite of services, like ping / uptime, cron, etc etc. into one.

[mmahemoff]

This could be nice for small apps. The problem with higher-scale apps is you want to handle requests as quick as possible - they should be well under a second. And under typical server configurations, it will time out altogether after maybe 30-60 seconds.

[Aqua_Geek]

Doesn't Heroku already have a few of these? https://addons.heroku.com/#queues

[benjiweber]

Have you looked at ironworker? http://www.iron.io/worker

[bananpermobil]

I suggest https://www.webscript.io/