Alternatives
Products that do what A simple API/CLI for scheduling HTTP requests does
Hi HN! This is something I've been tinkering on for the past couple months. It's basically just an API/CLI for scheduling delayed or recurring jobs as HTTP requests. I initially built it as a personal tool to save myself a bit of time on little side projects where I've needed scheduled/recurring alerts, but decided it could be a good opportunity to practice building out a nice landing page [0] and documentation [1]. And who knows, maybe someone else will find it useful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The tool relies heavily on Elixir's Oban [2] library for managing jobs, and Mintlify [3] for…
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Hey HN, I'm the maintainer of node-cron (5M+ downloads/month), and I recently built Sidequest.js, a background job runner for Node.js inspired by Oban (Elixir) and Sidekiq (Rails). It solves some common problems I saw with libraries like node-cron: - Jobs don’t block your API: they run in isolated worker threads - No Redis or vendor lock-in: use Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB - Supports retries, uniqueness, concurrency, snoozing, prioritization - Comes with a CLI and a simple dashboard - Works great in monoliths and doesn’t require extra infra Quick start (no signup needed):…
2025 · docs.sidequestjs.com
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2025 · httl.dev
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A few months ago, I benchmarked FastAPI on an i9 MacBook Pro. I couldn't believe my eyes. A primary REST endpoint to `sum` two integers took 6 milliseconds to evaluate. It is okay if you are targeting a server in another city, but it should be less when your client and server apps are running on the same machine. FastAPI would have bottleneck-ed the inference of our lightweight UForm neural networks recently trending on HN under the title "Beating OpenAI CLIP with 100x less data and compute". (Thank you all for the kind words!) So I wrote another library. It has been a while since I have…
2023 · github.com
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In my last project, I was struggling to create and monitor cron jobs. So, instead of creating hundreds of standalone scrips and executing them with cron, I decided to turn those scripts into multiple endpoints. Next, I created a single service that I could schedule HTTP requests to those endpoints and monitor its execution. No more scripts, now everything is endpoints that I can run manually at any time I turned this scheduler service into a Micro-SaaS so you don't have to build it yourself: beew.io I know you can Schedule HTTP requests with Zapier but come on... I will not pay 50 bucks for…
2021
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I just had the best time learning about the REWE (German supermarket chain) API, how they use mTLS and what the workflows are. Also `mitmproxy2swagger`[1] is a great tool to create OpenAPI spec automatically. And then 2026 feels like the perfect time writing Haskell. The code is handwritten, but whenever I got stuck with the build system or was just not getting the types right, I could fall back to ask AI to unblock me. It was never that smooth before. Finally the best side projects are the ones you actually use and this one will be used for all my future grocery shopping.…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hi! I've built this because I kept reaching for Celery for simple scheduled tasks and it felt like overkill. I just needed "run this function every hour" or "daily at 9am", not distributed workers. So it's decorators for scheduling (@scheduler.every(5).minutes, @scheduler.daily.at("09:00")), state saves to JSON so jobs survive restarts, and there's an optional FastAPI dashboard if you want to see what's running. No Redis, no message broker, runs in-process with your app. Trade-off is it's single process only — if you need distributed workers, stick with Celery.
Jan 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN, I'm Alex, founder of Interval [0]. We’re bringing internal tools written like CLIs to the browser to make them more powerful, through a Node.js SDK which attaches them to a hosted dashboard without any frontend code. Large companies have full teams that work on internal dashboards and tooling. Interval brings that infrastructure to anyone. In our previous project we had ~65 CLI scripts for tasks like provisioning user accounts, moderating content, and migrating data. These were quick to write and powerful. They also turned into an ongoing timesuck. Non-technical coworkers needed to…
2022 · interval.com
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In my spare time to remind myself that I could actually build stuff (and learn some Python, Flask, Redis, etc) I put together a simple job board to feature the best jobs in the API industry. The jobs can be either building APIs at companies like Twilio, Box, Stripe, etc. or integrating them. In addition to featuring those jobs, I'm also aggregating API jobs from GitHub Jobs, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, and 37signals Job Board. Today I launched with what I would consider an 'MVP' with jobs from SendGrid, TokBox, Twilio, Zencoder, Parse, Stripe, Pusher and Box. Check it out, I'd love to know…
2012
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I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…
2025 · llmapitest.com
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Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
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Kalendis is an API-first scheduling backend. You keep your UI; we handle the gnarly parts (recurrence, time zones, DST, conflict-safe bookings). What it does: • MCP tool: generates typed clients and API route handlers (Next.js/Express/Fastify/Nest) so you can scaffold calls straight from your IDE/agent tooling. • Availability engine: recurring rules + one-off exceptions/blackouts, returned in a clean, queryable shape. • Bookings: conflict-safe endpoints for creating/updating/canceling slots. Why we built it: We kept rebuilding the same "hard parts" of…
Nov 2025 · kalendis.dev
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I run 3mins.news (https://3mins.news), an AI news aggregator built entirely on Cloudflare Workers. The backend has 10+ cron triggers running every few minutes: RSS fetching, article clustering, LLM calls, email delivery. The problem: Workers Paid Plan has hard monthly limits (10M requests, 1M KV writes, 1M queue ops, etc.). There's no built-in "pause when you hit the limit", CF just starts billing overages. KV writes cost $5/M over the cap, so a retry loop bug can get expensive fast. AWS has Budget Alerts, but those are passive notifications, by the time you read the email,…
Mar 2026
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It's at http://finkin.com. The goal is to allow a developer to sign up in seconds, and within minutes begin querying data. It runs under https and stores no access information. From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431583, I realized that all those types of sites are not tailored to developers like the other simple APIs around the web are (i.e. flickr). I made mine as simple as I thought possible. From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676458, I realized that eventually it should be a scalable model where you pay pennies per the # of requests you make. Right now it supports many…
2010
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Hi, this is my first npm package that is getting a couple of hundreds downloads. It's a super simple CLI time tracker, mostly suitable for 9 to 5 jobs I hope you check it out and tell me what you think. Demo and etc. https://github.com/omidfi/moro
2017
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Author here. Got tired of checking Upwork, NoFluffJobs, eFinancialCareers, LinkedIn and HN threads separately, so I built a CLI that scrapes them into a local SQLite DB and lets me browse everything in one web UI with filters and semantic search. Details: - Scraping via real browser over CDP (your own logged-in session, no API keys) - Embeddings run locally (nomic-embed-text via fastembed), stored in Lance - Rust backend, SolidJS frontend embedded in binary, single static executable Works for my use case (Europe-based contractor). It's my first rust project, decided to do local CLI, it's…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! I wanted to practice "vibe coding" and see how far and fast I can go by only prompting, without actual coding. I decided to make a simple CLI app that scrapes web docs into a single md file (I was annoyed that LLM keeps writing Tailwind 3 code for a Tailwind 4 project). In just a couple of hours, the CLI app was ready! Then iterated on arguments for another couple of hours. Result: https://github.com/vladstudio/web2llm Then I decided to go further and "productize" the CLI by making a web app for it. Another half-day, and the web app is ready!…
2025 · web2llm.dev
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At my day job, we have a daily async stand-up. We have to message a slack bot how many hours we have worked on a given task that day and overall. The format is: > Task: "Task Name" | Worked: 5h Total: 16h > Description: Finished implementation of feature. I don't complain. Most fully remote jobs come with a version of this, but doing it manually got tedious. So, I needed a simple app that would track this. I am not usually a fan of "vibe coded" apps, but this was an ideal candidate for it, since it's not production code. Most LLMs solve the problem by creating a single HTML file with forms…
2025 · htmlsync.io
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I've been exploring the self-hosting world for some time now, and I wanted to simplify things with one command and avoid having to jump through hoops to make my application self-hostable. I thought many of these could be automated, so I'm automating everything related to self-hosting, one after the other. Please check the roadmap for what I have in mind. I'm open to anyone who wants to contribute and give feedback.
2025 · kagehq.com
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2016 · github.com
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Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com
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As a software engineer, my reflex has always been to script everything I can. Scripting is easy, but everything around it is tricky: scripts have to run somewhere, they need access to credentials, they need to be monitored. None of it is simple. No-code automation platforms such as Zapier or IFTTT are too restrictive for technical tasks; CI/CD platforms make it easy to script tasks related to a repository, but are limited when trying to do anything else. I wanted the low level control you have when writing scripts while retaining the comfort of a platform managing execution for me. So I…
2022 · exograd.com
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