CronDrift
Catch scheduled jobs that keep slipping past their planned time
- Problem
- A developer found their GitHub Actions daily job scheduled at 03:17 UTC actually starting 6+ hours late every day, and drifting 20+ minutes later each day, because heavy abuse of free runners congests the schedule queue. Silent drift is almost impossible to notice yourself; you only find out when downstream data is wrong or a deploy lands late.
- Solution
- One job only: add a lightweight heartbeat to each external scheduled task via a curl ping or by reading public run history, compute drift between actual and expected intervals, and alert via email/Telegram/Slack past a threshold, with a drift curve and a 'time to move off this scheduler' hint.
- Users
- Indie devs and small teams running data syncs or auto-deploys on GitHub Actions, Vercel Cron or a VPS crontab
- MVP
- Connect a GitHub repo's workflow run history; define expected cron and compute drift; alert to email/Telegram when drift exceeds threshold; show a 30-day delay chart; a one-line curl heartbeat for non-GitHub jobs
- Revenue
- Free for 3 jobs, $5-9/month for more jobs and multi-channel alerts
- Why now
- Free CI/cron capacity is widely abused so scheduling delay is now common, nearly every indie dev has at least one timed job, and the integration surface is just public APIs