What norc is

The problem it exists for

Cron has outlasted every tool built to replace it, and it is still edited the same way: SSH into a box, run crontab -e, hope the syntax is right, and find out it wasn't when something silently stops running. The tooling that grew up around this — Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, Dead Man's Snitch and their peers — is monitoring: it tells you a job failed after the fact. It cannot edit the job, deploy a fix, or show you every machine at once.

norc sits in the gap between raw cron, which is too primitive, and monitoring-only tools, which are too passive. You get a calmer interface over the crontab you already run, plus the ability to change it.

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 deliberately is not

• Not a job runner. It does not execute your work; your system cron does.
• Not self-hosted. There is no on-prem mode, and the codebase is not open source.
• Not end-to-end encrypted. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, but norc can technically read what you store.
• Not certified. 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 and the security page says so in more detail rather than burying it.

Platforms and pricing

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

Pricing is a flat tier by machine count, not per job and not per monitor: jobs are unlimited on every machine you manage. The Free tier is $0 and stays that way. Full breakdown on the pricing page, and an honest side-by-side against the alternatives on the compare page (data as of August 2026).

Contact

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