Is Trigger.dev free for background jobs & cron?

Yes, Free costs nothing up to 41.09 hours, up to 200k runs.

How much does Trigger.dev cost for background jobs & cron?

A plan fee that comes back as the same amount of usage credit ($0, $10 or $50 a month), then $0.025 per thousand runs plus per-second compute by machine size. At list prices: job runs or steps 50k runs, job compute time 5 hours: $0/month (Free); job runs or steps 100k runs, job compute time 20 hours: $0/month (Free); job runs or steps 5 million runs, job compute time 100 hours: $137/month (Hobby).

Trigger.dev pricing

How Trigger.dev charges, what to know before you commit, and what you'd pay at your usage — next to what the alternatives would cost for the same thing.

How it charges

Checked 2026-10-03 on trigger.dev ↗ · USD, list prices

In short

A plan fee that comes back as the same amount of usage credit ($0, $10 or $50 a month), then $0.025 per thousand runs plus per-second compute by machine size.

Free plan: Yes
Cheapest paid plan: $10/mo
Side project: $0/mo Free
Growing: $0/mo Free
Scaling: $137/mo Hobby

What the model leaves out

Compute is priced on the Small 1x machine (0.5 vCPU) at $0.0000338/s = $0.12168/hour; the Micro machine (0.25 vCPU) costs half that. The monthly credit (Free $5, Hobby $10, Pro $50) pays for both runs and compute, but the model spends it all on compute and charges runs from the first one, so paid plans are overstated by at most the run charges inside the credit. Free is modelled as two separate caps ($5 of compute alone = 41.09 hours, $5 of runs alone = 200k runs); really both draw on the same $5. Waits longer than 5 seconds are not charged compute, and runs in the DEV environment are free. Pro add-ons (extra concurrency $10 per 50, extra seats beyond 25 at $20 each) are left out.

Before you commit

On the Free plan tasks stop once the $5 of monthly credit is used; on paid plans they keep running and usage past the included credit is billed.
Every run costs $0.000025 to invoke on top of its compute time, and retries consume compute too.
Compute is billed per second by machine size, so a larger machine than Small 1x multiplies the compute cost (Medium 1x is $0.000085/s).
No spend cap is enforced by default; billing limits and alerts are settings you turn on.

Plan	Monthly fee	Job runs or steps per month	Job compute time per month
Free	Free	up to 200k runs	up to 41.09 hours
Hobby	$10/mo	$0.025 per 1,000 runs	82.18 hours includedthen $0.12168 per hour
Pro	$50/mo	$0.025 per 1,000 runs	410.91 hours includedthen $0.12168 per hour

What you'd pay

Job runs or steps per month100k runsJob compute time per month20 hourssmall machine, 0.5 vCPU

FreeWithin the free allowance$0/mo

The same usage elsewhere

InngestPro$99+$99

TemporalDeveloper (pay as you go)$5.50+$5.50

UpstashPay as you go$1.00+$1.00

Cost as you grow

Trigger.dev Upstash Temporal Inngestx: job runs or steps per month (thousand runs), other usage scaled with it · cheapest usable plan at each point, list prices

All background jobs & cron pricing, compared →Which one fits your situation →