CronPilot

THE PROBLEM

Every side-project I ship ends up with a pile of recurring jobs: billing reminders, cleanup tasks, digest emails. Cron syntax is fine until you need retries, logs and alerts.

CronPilot gives you scheduled jobs with a UI, automatic retries and Slack alerts, in about two minutes. No YAML, no crontab, no SSH.

THE BUILD: 3 WEEKS

Week 1 was the scheduler core and the UI skeleton. Week 2, auth and Stripe. Week 3 was polish, docs and the launch post.

Day 14 was the low point: I rewrote the worker queue from scratch after losing jobs during a deploy.

The full journal is on the blog

★ LESSONS

1. Charge from day one: free users gave me polite feedback, paying users gave me bugs.
2. A boring stack ships faster: Phoenix + SQLite, zero surprises in production.
3. The launch post took two full days to write. Worth every hour: half the signups came from it.