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Type English. Get cron.

A natural-language to cron converter — describe your schedule in plain words and get the cron expression instantly.

Describe your schedule in plain words — "every weekday at 9 AM", "first Monday of the month", "every 5 minutes during business hours". The parser handles common patterns and tells you when input is ambiguous.

Type your schedule

Cron expression high confidence

0 9 * * 1-5

Verified translation

At 9:00 AM on weekdays

Supported patterns

What it understands.

Frequency expressions

  • "every minute", "every N minutes" (e.g. every 5 minutes)
  • "every hour", "every N hours", "every half hour" (e.g. every 2 hours)
  • "every day", "every weekday", "every weekend"
  • "every other day", "every N days" (e.g. every 3 days)
  • "every week", "every month", "every year", "every quarter" / "quarterly"
  • "every fortnight", "fortnightly", "bi-weekly", "every 2 weeks"
  • "twice a day", "three times a day", "four times a day"

Time-of-day

  • "at midnight" → 00:00
  • "at noon" → 12:00
  • "at 9 AM", "at 5:30 PM" — supports 12-hour and 24-hour
  • "at 14:00" — 24-hour format
  • The word "at" is optional — "every Monday 9 AM" works as well as "every Monday at 9 AM"

Day-of-week / day-of-month

  • "every Monday", "every Friday" — single days
  • "every weekday" / "every weekend"
  • "first day of the month", "last day of the month"
  • "on the 15th of every month"

Combined patterns

  • "every weekday at 9 AM" → 0 9 * * 1-5
  • "every 30 minutes during business hours" → */30 9-17 * * 1-5
  • "every Monday at 9:30 AM" → 30 9 * * 1
  • "every fortnight at 1 AM" → 0 1 1,15 * * (approximation — see note)

Approximations

Some phrases — "every fortnight", "every other day", "every N days" — cannot be expressed exactly in standard cron because cron has no concept of a multi-week interval that survives month boundaries. The parser returns the closest approximation and shows a warning explaining the tradeoff.

What it doesn't (yet) support

Complex temporal logic like "every 2nd Tuesday of the month", "first Monday of January", or relative dates ("tomorrow at 9 AM") aren't supported. For those, use the visual builder or write the cron directly in the explainer.

Confidence indicator

When the parser is sure.

High confidence: The phrase matches a known pattern exactly. Examples: "every Monday at 9 AM", "every 15 minutes".

Medium confidence: The parser found a partial match — perhaps the time was unclear, or the frequency was inferred. Verify the output translation matches what you wanted.

Low confidence: The parser couldn't match a known pattern. Try rephrasing using one of the example chips above, or use the visual builder instead.