You set up an AI assistant. It answers questions. You close the laptop. It goes silent.
That’s not an AI assistant — that’s a very expensive autocomplete. A real AI assistant keeps working when you’re not there: monitoring your site at 3am, drafting content overnight, sending you a briefing before you’ve had coffee. That’s the difference between a reactive tool and an autonomous agent.
OpenClaw’s cron system is what makes the difference. We’ve been running it for months, and it’s the single feature that turned OpenClaw from “interesting experiment” into an actual part of our business. This guide covers exactly how it works, how we set it up, and the specific cron jobs that now run automatically while we sleep.
What Are OpenClaw Cron Jobs?
Cron jobs are scheduled tasks — commands that run automatically at a set time or interval. In traditional Unix systems, cron runs shell scripts. In OpenClaw, cron runs AI agent sessions. You write a prompt, assign a schedule, and OpenClaw spins up a full AI session at that exact time, executes the task, and reports back.
Think of it like setting a meeting on your calendar — except instead of a meeting, it’s your AI doing actual work. Checking prices, writing drafts, monitoring services, sending alerts, updating spreadsheets. Real tasks, on a real schedule, with no human input required.
The difference from a regular cron script? Regular cron runs dumb code. OpenClaw cron runs a reasoning agent that can adapt, make decisions, call APIs, search the web, read files, write files, and send you messages when something needs attention. It’s not automation — it’s delegation.
How OpenClaw Cron Works Under the Hood
OpenClaw’s cron system lives in your configuration file. Every scheduled job has:
- A schedule — Standard cron syntax (e.g.,
0 9 * * *for 9am daily) - A prompt — The instruction your AI agent receives when it wakes up
- A model — Which AI model runs the session (Claude Opus, Sonnet, etc.)
- Optional context — Files or memory the agent loads on startup
When the schedule fires, OpenClaw creates an isolated session, loads your workspace context, injects the prompt, and lets the agent run to completion. The result gets logged and — if you configure it — sent to you via Telegram, Discord, or whatever channel you use.
The isolation is important. Each cron session is fresh context, so a badly-behaved 3am job doesn’t contaminate your morning session. They’re sandboxed runs, not shared state.
Setting Up Your First OpenClaw Cron Job
Cron jobs live in your OpenClaw config. Here’s the structure we use in openclaw.config.json:
{
"cron": [
{
"id": "morning-briefing",
"schedule": "0 7 * * *",
"label": "Morning Briefing",
"model": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
"prompt": "Generate a morning briefing: check Bitcoin price and 24h change via CoinGecko API, list any AI tool launches from the last 12 hours, check pending tasks in memory/active-projects.md, and send the summary to Telegram."
}
]
}That’s it. One object. Seven fields. Save the config, restart OpenClaw, and the agent wakes up at 7am every morning to run that task.
Cron Syntax Quick Reference
If you haven’t worked with cron before, the schedule field follows standard cron syntax:
| Schedule | Cron Expression |
|---|---|
| Every morning at 7am | 0 7 * * * |
| Every 20 minutes | */20 * * * * |
| Every hour | 0 * * * * |
| Monday–Friday at 9am | 0 9 * * 1-5 |
| Every day at midnight | 0 0 * * * |
| Three times daily (9am, 2pm, 7pm) | 0 9,14,19 * * * |
OpenClaw runs the scheduler in your local timezone (set in your OpenClaw config), so 0 7 * * * fires at 7am your time — not UTC. That’s a small detail that causes a lot of confusion when you first set things up.
Staggering Your Jobs
One thing we learned the hard way: don’t schedule multiple heavy jobs at the same minute. If you have five jobs all firing at 0 9 * * *, OpenClaw spins up five agent sessions simultaneously. That hammers the API and usually results in timeouts or rate limiting. Stagger them by at least 2–3 minutes:
"0 9 * * *" // Job 1 — Morning briefing
"3 9 * * *" // Job 2 — Content check (starts 3 min later)
"6 9 * * *" // Job 3 — SEO scan (starts 6 min later)
"10 9 * * *" // Job 4 — Affiliate report (starts 10 min later)Newer versions of OpenClaw (2026.2.13+) automatically stagger jobs that share the same schedule, but explicitly staggering them yourself is still cleaner and more predictable.
The 11 Cron Jobs Running on Our Setup (And What They Actually Do)
We don’t just write about this stuff — we run it. Here are the actual automated tasks running on our OpenClaw instance, with the real prompts we use:
1. Morning Briefing (7am Daily)
The first thing in the morning before we touch anything else:
Check Bitcoin price and 24-hour change via CoinGecko API.
Search for AI tool launches or major announcements from the last 12 hours
using python scripts/search.py. Check memory/active-projects.md for pending
tasks. Format as a concise briefing and send to Telegram.This replaced 20 minutes of tab-opening every morning. The briefing arrives at 7am; by the time we’re at the desk, we know what matters.
2. Content Publishing Engine (9am, 2pm, 7pm Daily)
Three times a day, the content engine fires. It checks the draft queue, selects the highest-priority unpublished draft, runs a quality gate check, publishes if it passes, generates a featured image, submits to Google’s Indexing API, and reports what it published. If the draft fails quality gates, it flags the issue and moves on.
This is what powers our consistent publishing schedule without us manually clicking “publish” three times a day.
3. Competitor Content Monitor (Every 6 Hours)
Check the RSS feeds of these competitor sites: [list of 8 competitor URLs].
Find any articles published in the last 6 hours on topics we don't cover.
Cross-reference against our published article list.
If gaps found, add to memory/content-gaps.md and alert via Telegram if high-priority.We’ve caught three major content gaps this month before competitors had time to dominate the keyword. Being second to market is losing. Being notified within 6 hours of a competitor publishing is the next best thing to being first.
4. Site Health Check (Every 30 Minutes)
This one’s the insurance policy:
Run a health check on computertech.co. Verify HTTP 200 response on homepage.
Check page load time. If site returns error codes or load time exceeds 8 seconds,
send immediate Telegram alert with status code and timestamp.Average response time for our server is around 1.2 seconds. The threshold is set at 8 seconds — that gives us buffer for occasional slowdowns without false alarms, but catches real outages within 30 minutes. Better than finding out when a reader tweets at us.
5. Weekly Traffic Analysis (Mondays, 8am)
SSH to 147.182.147.37. Pull nginx access logs from the last 7 days.
Identify the top 20 content pages by unique visits.
Compare to previous week — flag any articles with significant traffic drops
(potential ranking losses). Save report to memory/traffic-reports.md.Every Monday morning we have a traffic breakdown waiting. If Midjourney Review drops 30% week-over-week, we know to check for ranking movement before it becomes a revenue problem.
6. Affiliate Link Audit (Weekly, Sundays 10pm)
Check all affiliate links in published articles for broken redirects.
Use Python requests library to follow redirect chains and verify final destinations.
Log any broken or redirected links. Alert immediately if more than 3 broken links found.Affiliate links break constantly — tools rebrand, programs change networks, tracking URLs expire. A broken affiliate link is leaving money on the table. This job catches them before they’ve been broken for months.
7. AI Tool Launch Scout (Every 4 Hours)
Search for AI tool launches, product updates, and funding announcements
from the last 4 hours using DuckDuckGo search. Focus on: new AI tools,
major model releases, significant feature updates, large funding rounds ($50M+).
If high-priority news found, save to memory/content-opportunities.md and send Telegram alert.We covered three tool launches within 2 hours of announcement this month. For SEO, early coverage on low-competition brand keywords means first-mover advantage before the topic gets crowded.
8. Bitcoin Price Alert (Every 2 Hours)
Fetch Bitcoin price from CoinGecko. If price has moved more than 5% in the
last 2 hours (either direction), send Telegram alert with price, percentage change,
and 24h high/low. Otherwise, do nothing.Not financial advice. Just awareness. A 5% move in 2 hours is information worth having.
9. Google Search Console Data Pull (Tuesdays, 6am)
Pull last week's GSC data via API. Identify: (1) articles ranking positions 4-20
with 50+ impressions — prime candidates for optimization, (2) queries where we
rank but have no article — content gap signals, (3) articles with declining CTR.
Save analysis to memory/seo-opportunities.md.This replaced an hour of manual GSC clicking every week. The “positions 4-20 with high impressions” list is pure gold — those are articles one optimization push away from meaningful traffic gains.
10. Content Freshness Scanner (1st of Each Month)
Review published articles older than 90 days. Check for: outdated pricing
(look for price mentions and verify against current tool websites),
deprecated features, tools that have shut down. Flag any articles needing
updates and save to memory/content-refresh-queue.md.Stale content is a silent traffic killer. A pricing comparison article with year-old numbers actively hurts credibility when readers check and find it’s wrong. This job keeps us ahead of it.
11. End-of-Day Summary (11pm Daily)
Generate end-of-day summary: articles published today, content gaps identified,
affiliate alerts, site health status, notable AI news from the last 12 hours.
Save to memory/daily-logs/ with today's date. Send brief version to Telegram.The day’s activity, summarized. If something important happened that slipped through, it shows up here. If a cron job failed, the absence of its report shows up here too.
Writing Good Cron Prompts
The quality of your automation is entirely determined by the quality of your prompts. A vague prompt produces vague results. Here’s what separates cron prompts that actually work from ones that produce walls of useless text:
Be Specific About Output
Bad: “Check our content and see if anything needs updating.”
Good: “Check articles in the content-refresh-queue.md. For each article, verify the pricing section against the tool’s current pricing page. If pricing has changed, update the article via WP CLI and log the change.”
The agent needs to know what “done” looks like. Vague input produces rambling output.
Specify the Alert Threshold
Don’t make the agent guess when to alert you. “Send an alert if something important happens” means the agent either alerts on everything or nothing, depending on how it interprets “important.” Instead:
“Alert if site load time exceeds 5 seconds OR HTTP status is not 200.”
“Alert if BTC moves more than 5% in either direction in the last 2 hours.”
“Alert only if the affiliate link returns a 404 — not if it redirects.”
Tell It What to Do With Results
Every cron prompt should end with one of these:
- “Save results to [specific file]”
- “Send summary to Telegram”
- “Do nothing if no issues found”
Without this, the agent writes its findings into the void. No memory, no notification, no record that the job ran.
Use Conditional Logic
OpenClaw agents can reason, so use it:
Check today's publish count in WordPress.
If fewer than 3 articles published today AND there are drafts in the queue,
publish the highest-priority draft.
If 3 or more already published, do nothing and log "Daily limit reached."This is the kind of logic you’d otherwise need a real developer to code. With an agent, you write it in plain English.
OpenClaw Cron vs. Traditional Automation Tools
You might be thinking: “Can’t I just use Zapier? Or n8n? Or a simple cron script?” Yes. And for simple, deterministic tasks (post a tweet when a new article publishes), those tools are fine. Better, even — they’re faster and cheaper per-run.
Where OpenClaw cron wins is tasks that require judgment.
| Task Type | Traditional Automation | OpenClaw Cron |
|---|---|---|
| Post new article to Twitter | ✅ Better (faster, cheaper) | Works, but overkill |
| “Is this content gap worth covering?” | ❌ Can’t reason | ✅ Can evaluate and decide |
| Resend failed email on error | ✅ Better (deterministic) | Works, but overkill |
| “Does this article need updating?” | ❌ Can’t read/evaluate content | ✅ Can read, analyze, and decide |
| Send webhook when form submits | ✅ Better (instant, cheap) | Works, but overkill |
| Write a draft based on new keyword data | ❌ Can’t write | ✅ Can research and draft |
The honest take: Zapier handles triggers and data piping. OpenClaw handles tasks that require reading, reasoning, and writing. If your workflow needs all three, you might need both — and that’s fine. We use Zapier for some webhook work and OpenClaw for everything that requires a brain.
Real Results: What 3 Months of OpenClaw Cron Actually Produced
Here’s what running this automation system actually looks like in practice, without the hype:
The content engine has published consistently three times a day since we set it up. Before, we’d miss days when life got in the way. Now the schedule holds regardless. That consistency compounds — Google rewards sites that publish regularly, and the traffic reflects it.
The competitor monitor caught two major content gaps we would have missed: the AI headshot generator category and AI resume builders. Both became articles that now rank in the top 10 for their target keywords. Finding those opportunities took the agent 6 minutes. It would have taken us a half-day of manual research — if we’d thought to do it at all.
The site health monitor caught one actual outage — a server memory issue that took the site down for about 20 minutes overnight. We got the alert, SSH’d in, and had it back up before most of our audience was even awake. Without the monitor, we wouldn’t have known until the next morning.
The affiliate link audit found 7 broken links across our older content in the first week. Two of those were high-traffic pages. Those were dead revenue that had been sitting there for who knows how long.
None of this is magic. It’s just consistent execution of tasks that are easy to deprioritize when you’re doing everything manually.
Troubleshooting Common OpenClaw Cron Issues
Job Fires But Does Nothing
Usually a prompt problem. The agent completed successfully but the prompt didn’t specify an output. Add an explicit “save results to X” or “send summary to Telegram” at the end of every prompt.
Jobs Not Firing at Expected Time
Check your timezone configuration in openclaw.config.json. The scheduler uses whatever timezone is set there. If it’s UTC and you expected local time, your 9am job is running at 2am (or whenever UTC 9am is for your zone).
Multiple Jobs Timing Out
Stagger them. Don’t schedule five jobs at the same minute. Add a 2–3 minute offset between concurrent jobs to avoid hitting API rate limits.
Telegram Alerts Not Arriving
Verify your channel setting in the cron config includes the correct Telegram target. After OpenClaw 2026.2.13, cron jobs require an explicit channel target — the default “send to chat” isn’t automatically inherited from your main session config. Check the job’s channel field specifically.
Agent Produces Hallucinated Results
This usually happens when the prompt asks the agent to verify information it can’t actually access — like checking a live price without specifying an API or tool to use. Always specify exactly how the agent should get information. “Check Bitcoin price” is vague. “Fetch Bitcoin price via CoinGecko API at https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin&vs_currencies=usd” is precise and reliable.
Getting Started: Your First Week Setup
If you’re new to OpenClaw or haven’t set up cron jobs yet, here’s a practical first-week sequence:
Day 1: Start with one job. Don’t try to automate everything immediately. Set up the morning briefing. Run it for 24 hours. See what you actually get and adjust the prompt based on what’s useful and what’s noise.
Day 2–3: Add a monitoring job. Site health check, server uptime, whatever you actually care about being alerted on. This gives you immediate value — knowing immediately when something breaks is worth the 10 minutes of setup.
Day 4–5: Add a content or research job. Something that saves you manual time — a weekly competitor check, a keyword opportunity scan, a content freshness audit. These have slower payoff but compound over time.
Week 2 onward: Iterate. Review what the agents produced. What was useful? What was noise? Tighten the prompts. Add jobs where you identified new manual tasks worth automating. Remove jobs that aren’t delivering value.
The goal isn’t to have the most cron jobs. It’s to have the right ones — jobs that produce actionable output you’d otherwise have to generate yourself.
OpenClaw Resources and Next Steps
OpenClaw is open-source and actively developed. You can review the full codebase and contribute at GitHub — OpenClaw. The official documentation, including the full cron configuration reference, lives at docs.openclaw.ai.
If you want to understand the bigger picture of what’s possible with OpenClaw before diving into cron jobs specifically, our article on building an AI employee that works 24/7 covers the overall architecture and what a fully-configured OpenClaw setup looks like in practice.
For the coding side of building with AI, Cursor and Windsurf pair well with OpenClaw — use OpenClaw for autonomous agent tasks, and a coding-focused AI editor for the actual development work. And if you’re evaluating broader AI assistant options, our Lindy AI review and AI tools pricing comparison cover how OpenClaw stacks up against the alternatives.
For deeper AI automation, Metaswarm is worth a look if you need multi-agent orchestration — it solves different problems than OpenClaw but complements it well for larger workflows.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does OpenClaw cron work without an internet connection?
No. OpenClaw cron jobs spin up AI agent sessions that make API calls to AI model providers. You need an internet connection and valid API keys for the models you’re using. The scheduler itself runs locally, but the agent sessions require connectivity.
How much does running OpenClaw cron jobs cost?
Costs depend on your model selection and job complexity. Lighter jobs (monitoring, alerts) using Claude Sonnet run roughly $0.01–0.05 per session. Complex jobs (writing full content drafts, deep research) using Opus can run $0.15–0.50 per session. With 11 jobs running multiple times daily, we typically spend $3–8/day in API costs. Choosing Sonnet over Opus for simple jobs cuts this significantly.
Can OpenClaw cron jobs trigger other cron jobs?
Not directly — cron jobs are isolated sessions and don’t have native inter-job triggering. However, a job can write a flag file that another job reads and acts on. This is how we chain the “content gap detector” job to the “draft writing” job — the first writes to a file, the second reads it on its next run.
What happens if a cron job fails mid-task?
OpenClaw logs the failure with an error code. The job doesn’t automatically retry — it waits until the next scheduled run. For critical jobs, add an explicit check at the start of the prompt: “If there’s a previous failed task in memory/failed-jobs.md, complete that first before starting today’s task.”
Can I run cron jobs on a VPS instead of my local machine?
Yes — and for production use, this is the better option. Running OpenClaw on a VPS means jobs fire reliably even when your laptop is closed. We use a DigitalOcean droplet for our server-side cron jobs and keep a local instance for interactive work. The config is identical; just install OpenClaw on the VPS and point it at the same config files.
How do I test a cron job without waiting for the schedule?
Trigger it manually from the OpenClaw CLI using the job ID. This lets you validate the prompt and output before committing to a schedule. It’s the same agent session — you’re just skipping the wait.
Is there a limit to how many cron jobs I can run?
No hard limit in the software — you’re limited by API rate limits from your model provider and your own compute. Practically, we’d recommend not running more than 3–4 concurrent heavy jobs. Stagger everything by at least 2 minutes.
