# Routines vs Managed Agents: where recurring Claude work should live > Source: > Published: 2026-06-16 16:17:55+00:00 Anthropic shipped Claude Code Routines in April and Managed Agents scheduled deployments in June 2026. Same question — "run this on a cron" — but different billing (subscription vs $0.08/session-hour + tokens), identity (you vs service account), and schedule granularity. I wrote a side-by-side for solo devs choosing between personal Routines and platform cron, plus when you still need external orchestration for multi-step workflows with human gates. Full comparison table and decision matrix on [the canonical post.](https://outofcontext.dev/blog/routines-vs-managed-agents-schedules/)