The control plane for cron

The problem it exists for

Cron fails silently. A job stops running, nothing errors, and you find out days later. It is still edited the same way: SSH into a box, run crontab -e, hope the syntax is right. The tooling that grew up around this (Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, Dead Man's Snitch and their peers) is monitoring: it tells you after the fact that a job did not check in. It cannot edit the schedule, show you every machine at once, or catch up the run.

norc sits between raw cron and monitoring-only tools. It keeps the monitoring side (run history, missed-run detection) and adds the control side: one view, and the ability to change the schedule. We think people want both: the monitoring and the control.

How it works

Each managed machine runs a small agent that connects outbound to norc. There is no inbound port to open, and norc never holds your SSH keys. It has no SSH client at all. Every write is authorised by a short-lived capability token signed with ES256 and scoped to a single machine and action.

Your jobs run on your machine's own system cron daemon. norc is never in the execution path, which means a norc outage costs you visibility and remote editing, not execution. The writer also only ever touches the lines it manages, so hand-written crontab entries survive untouched.

What norc doesn't do

norc doesn't run your jobs; your system cron does. It isn't self-hosted: there is no on-prem mode, and the codebase is not open source. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest but not end to end, so norc can technically read what you store. There is no SOC 2, ISO 27001, completed penetration test, or bug bounty programme yet.

If any of those is a hard requirement for your threat model, norc is the wrong tool today. The security page has more detail.

Platforms and pricing

norc runs on the web, a macOS desktop app, a headless CLI agent for Linux and macOS servers. iOS and Android apps are in internal testing. Windows and Linux desktop apps are in progress and not shipping yet. The FAQ has the current state.

Pricing is a flat tier by machines and jobs. Job limits count across all the machines on your account. The Free tier is $0 and stays that way. The pricing page has the full breakdown, and the compare page sets norc against the alternatives (data as of August 2026).

Contact

Questions, security reports, and anything else: hello@norc.app.