{"slug": "402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents", "title": "402cron: Pay-per-delivery cron scheduling for AI agents", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "# 402cron\n\nScheduled HTTP delivery for autonomous agents — signed, verified, paid with x402.\n     **No account, no card, no human.**\n\n    We guarantee that we **tried to deliver** your task.\n\nWe never pretend we can guarantee what someone else's server does with it.\n\n## How it works\n\n1. **Pay first.** One x402 payment in USDC on Base buys delivery credits. The response carries\n        your management token — shown once, tied to the wallet that paid. Credits never expire.\n2. **Prove the destination.** Register the URL you want us to call — it must be`https://` — and we POST a challenge to that exact URL for you to echo back. The permission\n        covers that path and everything beneath it — not the whole domain.\n3. **Schedule it.** Create a task with a 5-field cron expression, always UTC, one minute at the\n        finest. We deliver a signed HTTP request on that schedule.\n\nEvery request carries an HMAC signature, a timestamp and a delivery id that stays the same across retries.\n     **Delivery is at-least-once:** if your acknowledgement is lost we will send the same delivery id\n     again, so treat a repeated id as already handled. Answer within 2 seconds — return `202` and do the\n     work in your own background; the timeout is for acceptance, not for finishing.\n\n## When things fail\n\nA timeout or an unreachable host is retried, at most 3 attempts per execution, and then the task pauses itself.\n     A `4xx` or `5xx` from your server is a clear answer, not a fault on our side, so it is\n     never retried — but 20 refusals or 10 server errors in a row pause the task too. The task status always says\n     which of these stopped it, and resuming is one call.\n\n## Pricing\n\n| Attempts | Price | Per attempt | Endpoint | \n|---|---|---|---|\n| 20 | $0.02 | $0.001 | [`/buy/trial`](/buy/trial) | \n| 4,000 | $2 | $0.0005 | [`/buy/starter`](/buy/starter) | \n| 50,000 | $25 | $0.0005 | [`/buy/month`](/buy/month) | \n\n**You pay per delivery attempt, not per outcome.** A `2xx`, a `4xx`, a\n     `5xx`, a timeout and an unreachable host each cost one credit — we tried, and trying is what we\n     charge for. Our own failures cost you nothing, and a skipped execution (the previous one is still running)\n     costs nothing either. One failing cycle is at most 3 credits.\n\nYou buy a *quantity*, never a calendar period: a month that expires while your agent\n     sleeps is a month you paid for and never used. \n\n## For machines\n\n| [`/docs`](/docs) | Full API, as JSON | \n| [`/api/pricing`](/api/pricing) | Machine-readable tariff | \n| [`/.well-known/402cron.json`](/.well-known/402cron.json) | Service manifest | \n| [`/.well-known/agent-card.json`](/.well-known/agent-card.json) | A2A agent card | \n| [`/health`](/health) | Liveness — 503 when we are broken | \n| [`/abuse`](/abuse) | Getting our requests and want them stopped? |", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents", "canonical_source": "https://402cron.com/", "published_at": "2026-09-13 11:08:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-13 11:34:49.233481+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["402cron", "Base", "USDC", "x402"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/402cron-pay-per-delivery-cron-scheduling-for-ai-agents.jsonld"}}