Vercel Schedules Enters Public Beta on All Plans as the Successor to Cron Jobs

Vercel announced on 5 November 2026 that Vercel Schedules is in public beta on all plans. It runs tasks on a recurring schedule or at a single point in time, across production, preview and custom environments. It succeeds Cron Jobs, and existing Cron Jobs keep working, so nothing needs to be migrated in a hurry.

Schedules defined in vercel.json can target a private Vercel Function, an HTTP path or a Vercel Queue topic. Schedules created at runtime target a Queue topic. That runtime option is the real change, because it means an application can create a one-off job itself, for example a reminder email 24 hours after a booking, without a redeploy.

Each schedule can be enabled, disabled or run on demand without redeploying. Anyone who has debugged a cron job by pushing a commit to trigger it will appreciate the run-on-demand control.

On the Hobby plan, the limits are 500 schedule creations and 5,000 runs per month. On Pro and Enterprise, the pricing is $5 per million runs and $10 per million creations. For most small sites those figures will be negligible, but a feature that creates a schedule per user could add up, so it is worth estimating before you build one.

We would use it for the quiet jobs that most client sites need: clearing expired booking holds, sending reminders, refreshing cached feeds and publishing scheduled content. Schedules that target a Queue topic also fit the pattern of doing slow work outside the request that triggered it.

Two cautions. This is a beta, so check the behaviour on failed runs before relying on it for anything a customer would notice. And as with any scheduler, make each job safe to run twice, because retries and manual runs make duplicates a realistic case.

If your projects already use Cron Jobs, there is no need to change anything today. For new projects with per-user timing, Schedules is the one to try first.