Running Cron Tasks on Heroku

Question

I\'ve seen that Heroku charges $15/mo to run Delayed Job, and $3/mo to run cron tasks daily. Is it possible to skip that entirely and run my own cron tasks manually? Or ar

Answer 1

Updating the answer for 2020:

1. You can use Heroku Scheduler which is Heroku's own add-on that lets you schedule commands using one-off dynos (so that you only pay for the run time of your jobs). The add-on itself is free, but doesn't really allow you to use cron but rather plain frequency: every day, every hour or every 10 minutes. Also, there's no guarantee that your job will execute at the scheduled time or at all..

2. There are other 3rd party add-ons that can help you run one-off dynos using cron expressions for better flexibility and are more resilient than Heroku Scheduler (proper disclosure, my company is the creator of one such add-on).

3. You can also use custom clock process (see here for more info) which essentially means that you have one dyno or process spawn tasks that run on other dynos. This usually costs more than using the aforementioned add-ons, but you have more granular control over your processes and since you only rely on Heroku, it may be more stable.