Keep free tiers awake and put every recurring job on the right scheduler
Ready nowThe inventory of every scheduled job and the rule that free tiers auto-pause: Supabase pg_cron for polls and cache warming, Vercel cron for reconciles, GitHub Actions for snapshots and scrapes, launchd for laptop-side syncs, n8n pings that keep free Supabase projects awake.
Kit
No separate kit. The playbook is self-contained.
You need
| Account | Why | Free or paid | Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Postgres database, auth (dashboard logins), row level security, Realtime pulse, Edge Functions and pg_cron for every dashboard, the attribution tables, booking alerts and the Brain state. | Free tier available | Pro (25 USD/mo) for anything a client logs into. The free tier pauses a project after 7 days without traffic and caps an org at 2 active projects; a paused free project took three client dashboards offline at once (a project log). |
| Vercel | Hosts every site, funnel, dashboard and serverless API (subscribe, book, attribution, AC proxy). Runs the cron jobs declared in vercel.json. | Free tier available | Pro (20 USD/mo per seat). The Hobby plan forbids commercial use, so any client site or paid product must be on Pro. Hobby is fine for a personal portfolio. |
| GitHub | Every site, dashboard and workflow lives in a repo. Actions run scheduled jobs (email snapshots, daily scrapes). Issues double as an email alert channel for bookings. | Free | Free plan. Actions minutes on the free plan cover the cron jobs used here (a few minutes a day). |
| n8n (cloud or self-hosted) | Scheduled automations: Instagram research agent, Skool engagement digest, Supabase keep-alive pings, Calendly to Sheets go-live. The seven n8n skills and the n8n-mcp server build workflows from Claude Code. | Free tier available | n8n Cloud Starter (about 24 USD/mo) for hosted; self-hosted community edition is free on any VPS. |
| Claude Code (Anthropic Claude Pro or Max) | The AI operator every system runs through. Skills, hooks, memory, MCP servers and the Brain plugin all load inside Claude Code. | Paid | Claude Pro (20 USD/mo) works for light use; Max (100 USD or 200 USD/mo) for daily multi-hour sessions. Anthropic terms require each user to hold their own subscription; never share a login. |
What you bring
- Your list of the projects that must stay awake
- Your recurring task in one sentence
- A repository, when the routine needs code
The steps
- Write the job inventory
- Pick the scheduler by frequency, not by habit
- Build the keep-alive for every free project
- Give every job a heartbeat
- Create a Claude routine for an AI-shaped recurring task
- Add a weekly freshness sentinel
Goes further if you have already built Wire the plumbing behind any page (domain, DNS, pixel, form to ESP, credentials, keep-alive). You can build this without it.
Get the full playbook
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