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12 Comments

API Calls Scheduler as a Service

Hello!
This idea came to my mind a few weeks ago and I would like to hear what fellow devs think about it.
While working on my app Micro CRM (shameless plug: https://microcrm.cc). I needed a way to send emails to my users when they needed to follow up with a contact. It made me realize that they might be a possible market for this since as developers we often need to schedule API calls at certain times.
Basically the service will do the following:

  • Simple REST API to programmatically schedule the HTTP requests by setting time, date, recurrence, url to call as well as headers and possibly json body (or binary). It will also allow to manage (update, delete) scheduled jobs

  • A UI to manually setup HTTP requests, manage them and monitor

Basically what a few other people called it: CRON as a Service for Web Apps and Backends

Possible use cases:

  • Send a request to a webhook periodically

  • Send scheduled notifications to your users on their birthday

  • Reminders apps

  • Send recurring automatic messages , calls to users

I know other services like IFTTT and Zapier, etc but in my knowledge they do not offer a simple solution to setup scheduled rest calls programmatically within your app/backend as well as monitoring. Additionally from what I see their free tiers are quite limited in the number of tasks you can create. An app that need to schedule a large amount of HTTP calls might not be able to use those services and will need to hack around to make it work.

What do you guys think ? Would you pay for something like this ?? If you already use something for this problem can you tell me what it is and if you have any issues with it ???

I built a Google Form to collect emails of people interested to use this. if you'd like to be notified when the first version is out add your email. I WILL NOT SPAM YOU! https://forms.gle/QX1dTqC2UqWVruZY7

posted to Icon for group Ideas and Validation
Ideas and Validation
on December 1, 2019
  1. 3

    You can get inspiration from the Google Cloud Scheduler: https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/docs/quickstart

    1. 1

      I know about Google Cloud Scheduler ! My intent is build that allows you to programmatically do what they make you do manually, has a REST API

      1. 3

        No to discourage you but it has a REST and RPC interface as well: https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/docs/reference/rest/

        1. 2

          You had to find it didn't you 😡😡😡
          Just kidding 😅 I will look Into I'm not discouraged at all

  2. 2

    I use Apache Airflow for this at work, but it’s not focused solely on APIs and can be quite confusing if you don’t program in Python. I think you can easily separate your product from this by making it code-agnostic (to the extent possible) or by possibly solely focusing on APIs. Almost like an API workflow scheduler.

    1. 2

      Yes that is my intent !

      1. 1

        Nice. I think it'd be really handy, especially for those non-tech/no-code creators.

  3. 2

    So, this is Zapier but with a REST API interface? I like it.

  4. 1

    Wouldn’t a scheduling library do this? I know of your using node you can use node-scheduler. Just set when to run a function (API call or what not) and it will run it at the scheduled time

  5. 1

    Sometime back I was working on a scheduler functionality and then I created DearEle.com I am not sure if anyone pay for scheduling service.

    BTW, dearele is currently down, fake Chinese products started misusing my service mails.

  6. 2

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 1

      Yes! CRON as a Service for any backend and any app

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