The $3/month Cron Service
When we published our pricing page, the most common reaction was surprise. Three dollars a month for 25 cron jobs with one-minute intervals, AI diagnostics, and job chains? That is less than a small coffee. People assumed it was an introductory price or a loss leader. It is neither.
The math works
Running a cron job service is not expensive if you build it right. A single job running every minute generates about 43,200 executions per month. Each execution is a lightweight HTTP request that takes a few hundred milliseconds of compute time. At cloud compute prices, that is a fraction of a cent per job per month.
The real cost drivers for cron services are database storage for execution history, outbound bandwidth for HTTP requests, and AI inference for failure diagnosis. We keep these costs low through aggressive retention policies (7 days on the Hobby plan), response body truncation (we store the first 1KB, not the full response), and a deterministic pattern matcher that handles 60% of failure diagnoses without touching the LLM.
Why cheap matters
Developer tools have a cold-start problem. If your free tier is too limited, developers cannot evaluate the product properly. If your paid tier is too expensive, they will not upgrade for side projects. The gap between “free but limited” and “$15/month for the real thing” is where most developer tools lose potential users.
Our Hobby plan at $3/month sits right in the impulse-purchase zone. It is cheap enough that a developer will upgrade without filing an expense report or asking their manager. It is real money, so users feel committed and actually use the product. And it generates enough revenue per user to cover our infrastructure costs with margin.
The growth model
Developers who start on the Hobby plan for a side project bring JustRun to their day job. The day-job team needs more jobs, shorter intervals, and Slack integration, so they upgrade to Maker or Pro. That single $3/month subscription becomes a $19/month or $49/month team account. We have seen this pattern repeatedly during our beta.
We would rather have 10,000 developers paying $3/month than 500 developers paying $49/month. The larger user base generates more feedback, more word-of-mouth, and more upgrade opportunities. Cheap is a feature, not a compromise.