Explain a cron expression in plain English, list its next runs in UTC and warn where schedulers disagree.

Cron explainerFreeFor developers

3 min

saved on a typical run. Our estimate, against reading the five fields against a cron reference and working out the next dates by hand.

Before: what you give it

The example input, as typed in. You paste text or a file's contents.

30 14 * * 1

After: what comes back

The first lines of a real run of the tool's own code on that input. Nothing here is edited by hand.

30 14 * * 1
at 14:30, on Monday, UTC.

Next runs:
  2026-10-26 14:30 UTC
  2026-11-02 14:30 UTC
  2026-11-09 14:30 UTC
  2026-11-16 14:30 UTC
  2026-11-23 14:30 UTC

Schedulers run in UTC. 1 run a day on matching days.

What you get

A plain-English sentence, the next runs in UTC and warnings for shapes that Workers, GitHub Actions and crontab read differently

What it cannot do

Five-field expressions only, and every time is shown in UTC; it does not know your scheduler's time zone settings.

Who it is for

Developers

Free and Pro

Free	30 runs a day per IP address.
Pro	No daily limit, 300 requests a minute.

Daily caps for every tool

Use it from your assistant

The tool is called explain_cron. Connect the server once, then ask for it by name or describe the job. Install steps.

claude mcp add --transport http toolbox https://toolbox.allthepossibles.com/mcp

curl -X POST https://toolbox.allthepossibles.com/api/cron -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"expression":"30 14 * * 1"}'

Try it here

The form starts with the same example input, so you can run it first and then swap in your own.

Cron expression