Vercel's built-in cron triggers your serverless functions on a schedule. For simple use cases it works. But it has no failure alerts, no execution history on the Hobby plan, and no way to know whether your function actually completed successfully — only that it was called.
Where Vercel cron falls short
Vercel cron works by invoking one of your API routes on a schedule defined in vercel.json. The invocation is fire-and-forget — if your function times out, throws an error, or returns a non-2xx status, you get no alert. You find out when a user reports something is broken.
The specific gaps developers run into:
No failure alerts. Vercel does not send an email or webhook if your scheduled function fails.
