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Workflows & background jobs

A per-minute schedule is not a bigger job than a daily one.

It is the same second of work, 43,200 times. The reason automation is expensive everywhere else is not the work — it is having somewhere for the work to happen at all, awake and waiting, twenty-four hours a day, for the twelve seconds it is needed.

Ours sleeps when there is no work. We have not found anyone who does it cheaper.

Priced both ways

Somewhere for it to happen.

Workflows & background jobs

Things that run without anyone watching

A sync every minute, a nightly import, a follow-up that fires three days later. The work itself is seconds; the cost is in having somewhere for it to happen at all.

Doing it yourself

  • Vercel Cron, once a minuteHobby's minimum interval is once a day, so this needs Pro at $20/mo$20.00
  • An EC2 worker sitting theret4g.nano awake all month to be busy for twelve hours of it$7.36

Whichever you pick$7.36+

On SproutOS

$0.01/mo

43,200 runs — one a minute

Paying by the run makes that cost what it weighs. Nothing is reserved for you between runs, so nothing is billed between runs.

Compared with n8n

The same capability, minus the trapdoor.

The nodes, without the box
n8n is a good editor attached to a server somebody has to keep upright. Self-hosting it means a machine that is awake all month so it can be busy for twelve hours of it, plus the patching, plus the upgrade that breaks a credential.
Cloud n8n bills by execution volume
You move from paying for an idle box to paying a monthly plan sized by how many times your automations ran. Either way, the meter is not the work.
Here it is code, in your repository
Which means it is reviewable, diffable and yours — and it can do the things a node palette does not have a node for, because there is no palette.

Comparison figures are published list prices for us-east-1, read from the AWS pricing API in August 2026 and multiplied by 730 hours, and are the cheapest option each vendor offers rather than a typical bill.

What people actually build

Nobody has to build it, either.

You describe what should happen and when. No engineer to borrow, no ticket, no self-hosted automation server for someone to keep upright. Five minutes, in your own words.

  • A plugin backend for Obsidian or Notion

    Sync, transform and enrich your own notes on your own schedule, against a database only you can reach. No shared cloud, no third party holding the vault.

  • A news digest that reads what you actually follow

    Pull the feeds, cluster the repeats, summarise the rest, send one email at seven. Runs for a couple of seconds a day and bills like it.

  • An inbox summariser

    Read overnight mail, group it, surface the three things that need an answer. Private by construction: it is your code, in your project, talking to your account.

All of it private by default — your code, your database, your account. The cheap version of this elsewhere is someone else's cloud reading your notes. The mechanics of scheduling, retries and logs are in the background workers documentation.

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