About Us

Helping developers make friends with cron since 2026

Most developers know the situation. It's late, a deployment is waiting, and the last thing between you and going home is one line in a crontab: five cryptic fields that decide whether your backup runs every night at 2 AM, every minute of the 2 AM hour, or only on the 2nd of February. You search for "cron syntax" for the fifteenth time in your career, squint at a table of asterisks, and hope for the best.

We built CronExpression because it shouldn't have to work that way. Cron is one of the oldest and most reliable tools in computing. It has been running backups, reports and cleanup jobs on servers since the 1970s, but its syntax was never meant to be read by someone in a hurry. Getting it wrong has a price: missed jobs, pages in the middle of the night, duplicated invoices.

So we built the tool we had always wanted. The Builder lets you compose a schedule field by field and immediately shows the expression, a plain-English description and the next five run times, so you can see what you scheduled before it ships. The Explainer takes an expression you inherited from a config file and translates it back into words. The FAQ answers the questions we kept looking up ourselves.

We want you to understand the expressions you get here, which is why every result comes with an explanation: the developer who understands */15 9-17 * * 1-5 today writes the next one without our help. If CronExpression makes cron click for you even once, it has done its job.

Everything here is free and runs entirely in your browser, and you don't need an account to use it. If you have ideas or feedback, or you found an expression that stumped us, we'd like to hear about it. You can reach us through the Contact Us page.

Happy scheduling,
The CronExpression team