Introducing Vercel Schedules

Vercel Schedules, now in public beta, lets a running application or an AI agent create, change or cancel scheduled work through code, without redeploying (Vercel). That is the gap with Vercel's existing cron jobs, which are defined in project configuration and only change when the project is redeployed. A schedule tells Vercel when to trigger a task and where to send it; the application still supplies the code that does the work.

Vercel's example is a user telling an agent, "Tomorrow morning, summarize the top five stories on Hacker News." The usual approach is to save the request and its time in a database and run a cron job that keeps checking for work that is due. With Schedules, the agent is given a tool that creates a one-time schedule holding the request and the time to run it. When it is due, Vercel delivers the saved request through its Queues service to the app, which checks the user's current permissions and starts the agent. These dynamic schedules, one-time or recurring, are created through a JavaScript SDK, the command line or an API and are delivered through Queues topics.

Fixed jobs can still live in configuration. A static schedule, set in vercel.json, can call a private function, such as a nightly cleanup at 2 a.m. New York time, that is never exposed at a public URL, and Vercel checks that each call comes from its scheduling service. Both kinds can be tested on preview deployments before production, and a project's Schedules tab can run a schedule on demand and show past runs. Vercel says its eve agent framework already uses Schedules to give agents hosted on Vercel their scheduling tools.