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Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

cron.io

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Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#47
For most people, the URLs these jobs are hitting will be calling code that they themselves have written, is that right?

If so, since I'm writing a bunch of code to do work, the marginal cost of dropping a call to that code into cron is awfully low. I'm not sure why I'd bother creating another username and password in an external system, much less pay for it, to provide such a small amount of incremental value.

I'd understand if the idea was to offer the power of cron to the non-techie laymen, but I'm not getting the sense that's the target.

The "you don't have to worry about [foo] because we manage it for you" value proposition only makes sense when foo is hard to manage. And, for techies who can edit a crontab in 3.2 seconds, this might even be a step backwards in terms of productivity.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#48
post #47

For most people, the URLs these jobs are hitting will be calling code that they themselves have written, is that right? If so, since I'm writing a bunch of code to do work, the marginal cost of dropping a call to that code into cron is awfully low. I'm not sure why I'd bother creating another username and password in an external system, much less pay for it, to provide such a small amount of incremental value. I'd un…

You're assuming you have access to cron on the machine that code is running. Lots and lots of websites are running on shared hosting, where there's no such thing as cron access.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#49
post #47

For most people, the URLs these jobs are hitting will be calling code that they themselves have written, is that right? If so, since I'm writing a bunch of code to do work, the marginal cost of dropping a call to that code into cron is awfully low. I'm not sure why I'd bother creating another username and password in an external system, much less pay for it, to provide such a small amount of incremental value. I'd un…

You're assuming you have access to cron on the machine that code is running. Lots and lots of websites are running on shared hosting, where there's no such thing as cron access.

This is the perfect example of something that could be run on an always-connected, dual-core Atom machine (~$200) sitting in one's office. I don't understand the insistence on using a paid monthly service for something so simple. My crappy consumer router at home runs cron jobs.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#50
post #47

For most people, the URLs these jobs are hitting will be calling code that they themselves have written, is that right? If so, since I'm writing a bunch of code to do work, the marginal cost of dropping a call to that code into cron is awfully low. I'm not sure why I'd bother creating another username and password in an external system, much less pay for it, to provide such a small amount of incremental value. I'd un…

You're assuming you have access to cron on the machine that code is running. Lots and lots of websites are running on shared hosting, where there's no such thing as cron access.

But there are a lot of free cron service using a real interface and not an API.
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