What is CronSynth?

The Short Answer

CronSynth is a scheduling service for autonomous AI agents. You tell it when to call your webhook, and it calls your webhook at that time. Every time. Reliably. With cryptographic proof that the call came from CronSynth.

Think of it as an alarm clock for software that can't watch its own clock.

The Problem CronSynth Solves

Modern AI agents run on serverless infrastructure — platforms like Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, and Google Cloud Functions. These platforms are elegant: you write code, deploy it, and the platform handles scaling, availability, and infrastructure.

But serverless has a fundamental limitation: ephemeral execution.

When your function finishes running, the compute instance disappears. There's no persistent process. No background thread. No daemon watching the clock. Your code exists only in the moments when it's actively handling a request.

This creates a problem for agents that need to do things on a schedule:

• A trading bot that checks prices every 5 minutes
• A monitoring agent that verifies uptime every hour
• A content aggregator that fetches RSS feeds daily
• A DeFi agent that harvests yields at specific intervals

These agents can't set a timer and wait. When their code finishes executing, there's nothing left to count down the seconds.

How CronSynth Works

CronSynth externalizes the scheduling problem. Instead of your agent trying to maintain its own timer (impossible in serverless), CronSynth maintains the timer for you.

Step 1: Register a Schedule

You send CronSynth your webhook URL and a cron expression describing when you want to be called:

POST /api/schedule
{
  "webhookUrl": "https://your-agent.com/webhook",
  "cron": "*/5 * * * *"
}

This schedule says "call my webhook every 5 minutes."

Step 2: CronSynth Watches the Clock

CronSynth runs on infrastructure that doesn't disappear. Every minute, it checks which schedules are due. When yours matches, it prepares a webhook call.

Step 3: Your Agent Receives a Trigger

CronSynth sends an HTTP POST to your webhook URL:

{
  "scheduleId": "sch_a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8",
  "timestamp": 1701433200,
  "runNumber": 48,
  "cron": "*/5 * * * *"
}

The request includes an HMAC signature so your agent can verify it actually came from CronSynth.

Step 4: Your Agent Does Its Work

Your webhook handler wakes up, does whatever it needs to do (check prices, fetch data, execute trades), and returns a response. Then it goes back to sleep until the next trigger.

Key Features

Cryptographic Verification

Every webhook request is signed with HMAC-SHA256. Your agent verifies the signature using a secret shared at schedule creation. This prevents attackers from spoofing triggers.

Automatic Retries

If your webhook fails (network error, timeout, server error), CronSynth retries with exponential backoff: 1 second, then 4 seconds, then 16 seconds. Transient failures don't become missed triggers.

On-Chain Attestation

Triggers can be logged to Base L2. This creates an immutable record of your agent's execution history — useful for reputation, auditing, and trust-building.

x402 Native Payments

Authentication and billing happen through the x402 protocol. Your wallet address is your identity. Payments settle in USDC on Base. No API keys, no invoices, no credit cards.

Generous Free Tier

One schedule with unlimited triggers, free forever. Enough to build, test, and run small projects without spending anything.

Who Uses CronSynth

Autonomous AI Agents

Agents built with LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI, or custom frameworks that need to perform recurring tasks without human intervention.

Trading and DeFi Bots

Automated systems that need to check prices, rebalance portfolios, harvest yields, or execute strategies on predictable schedules.

Monitoring and Alerting Systems

Health checkers, uptime monitors, and alerting pipelines that need to run continuously without maintaining their own infrastructure.

Data Pipelines

RSS aggregators, API pollers, and content scrapers that need to fetch data at regular intervals.

Anyone Building on Serverless

If you're building on Vercel, Lambda, Workers, or similar platforms and need scheduled execution, CronSynth is the missing piece.

How CronSynth Compares

vs. Running Your Own Server

You could spin up a VM with cron installed. But then you're managing infrastructure, paying for 24/7 uptime, handling security updates, and building retry logic yourself. CronSynth costs less and requires zero maintenance.

vs. Platform-Native Cron (Vercel Cron, CloudWatch Events)

Platform cron features are limited: minimum 1-minute intervals, no signature verification, no retry logic, no on-chain attestation. They're fine for simple tasks but lack the features agents need.

vs. Traditional Scheduling Services

Services like cron-job.org or EasyCron work, but they're built for humans clicking through dashboards. CronSynth is API-first, wallet-authenticated, and designed for machine-to-machine communication.