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[ARTICLE · art-128224] src=402cron.com ↗ pub= topic=ai-agents verified=true sentiment=· neutral

402cron: Pay-per-delivery cron scheduling for AI agents

402cron launched a pay-per-delivery cron scheduling service for autonomous AI agents that requires no account, card, or human, charging in USDC on Base via x402 payments. The service delivers HMAC-signed HTTP requests on 5-field UTC cron expressions with at-least-once delivery, retrying timeouts and unreachable hosts at most 3 attempts per execution, and pricing starts at $0.02 for 20 attempts, $2 for 4,000 attempts, and $25 for 50,000 attempts. 402cron states it guarantees only that it tried to deliver a task, charging one credit per delivery attempt regardless of whether the destination server returns 2xx, 4xx, or 5xx.

read2 min views2 publishedSep 13, 2026

Scheduled HTTP delivery for autonomous agents — signed, verified, paid with x402. No account, no card, no human.

We guarantee that we **tried to deliver** your task.

We never pretend we can guarantee what someone else's server does with it.

How it works #

  1. Pay first. One x402 payment in USDC on Base buys delivery credits. The response carries your management token — shown once, tied to the wallet that paid. Credits never expire.
  2. Prove the destination. Register the URL you want us to call — it must behttps:// — and we POST a challenge to that exact URL for you to echo back. The permission covers that path and everything beneath it — not the whole domain.
  3. Schedule it. Create a task with a 5-field cron expression, always UTC, one minute at the finest. We deliver a signed HTTP request on that schedule.

Every request carries an HMAC signature, a timestamp and a delivery id that stays the same across retries.

     **Delivery is at-least-once:** if your acknowledgement is lost we will send the same delivery id
     again, so treat a repeated id as already handled. Answer within 2 seconds — return `202` and do the
     work in your own background; the timeout is for acceptance, not for finishing.

When things fail #

A timeout or an unreachable host is retried, at most 3 attempts per execution, and then the task s itself. A 4xx or 5xx from your server is a clear answer, not a fault on our side, so it is never retried — but 20 refusals or 10 server errors in a row the task too. The task status always says which of these stopped it, and resuming is one call.

Pricing #

| Attempts | Price | Per attempt | Endpoint |

|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | $0.02 | $0.001 | [`/buy/trial`](/buy/trial) | 
| 4,000 | $2 | $0.0005 | [`/buy/starter`](/buy/starter) | 
| 50,000 | $25 | $0.0005 | [`/buy/month`](/buy/month) | 

You pay per delivery attempt, not per outcome. A 2xx, a 4xx, a 5xx, a timeout and an unreachable host each cost one credit — we tried, and trying is what we

     charge for. Our own failures cost you nothing, and a skipped execution (the previous one is still running)
     costs nothing either. One failing cycle is at most 3 credits.

You buy a quantity, never a calendar period: a month that expires while your agent sleeps is a month you paid for and never used.

For machines #

| [`/docs`](/docs) | Full API, as JSON | 
| [`/api/pricing`](/api/pricing) | Machine-readable tariff | 
| [`/.well-known/402cron.json`](/.well-known/402cron.json) | Service manifest | 
| [`/.well-known/agent-card.json`](/.well-known/agent-card.json) | A2A agent card | 
| [`/health`](/health) | Liveness — 503 when we are broken | 
| [`/abuse`](/abuse) | Getting our requests and want them stopped? |
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