Scheduled Workflow Triggers + Per-Node Credit Pricing

Until now, every workflow needed a human starting it — a chat message, a form submission, a webhook. Cron triggering changes that. Pick a schedule, point it at a published workflow, and it runs on its own.

To keep that automation sustainable, non-AI workflow nodes now cost 0.1 message credits per execution — a small flat fee that covers the compute behind each step (network calls, code sandbox time, etc.). AI nodes continue to bill by token cost as before. Full details are in What It Costs below.

What You Can Do

• Send a daily digest — Pull yesterday's leads from your database at 8 AM and email them to your sales team.
• Sync data between systems — Hit a partner API hourly and update your CRM with fresh records.
• Run periodic health checks — Schedule an API call with a Validate block that escalates when something looks wrong.
• Automate follow-ups — Re-engage leads that haven't replied in a week, or expire stale records on a weekly cleanup pass.

How to Use

• Open Cron Triggering — Navigate to My Chatbots > [Chatbot] > Cron Triggering and click Create Trigger.
• Set the schedule and name it — Pick a preset (every hour, day, week) or paste a custom cron expression — for example, "0 9 * * 1-5" runs at 9 AM on weekdays. Give the trigger a recognizable name like "Daily lead digest".
• Pick a workflow to run — Select a published workflow from the list, or create a new one inline. The trigger fires that workflow on schedule.
• Tune the run (optional) — Provide a seed message to act as the initial user input, override the starting values of any user-defined variables, and set concurrency and execution-timeout limits to fit your workload.
• Save and enable — Switch the trigger on. It runs on the next scheduled tick.

Nodes that only make sense in a live conversation — Form, Live Chat Escalation, Close Conversation — skip automatically when triggered by cron. No errors, no charges for the skipped steps.

What It Costs

A scheduled run is billed the same way as any workflow run.

• Non-AI nodes — Code, API Call, Send Email, Set Variables, Conditions, Validate, Wait, Geolocation, and the rest each cost 0.1 message credits per execution. This is a flat per-node fee that covers the compute used to run the block (network calls, code sandbox time, etc.).
• AI nodes — AI Action, AI Conversation, AI Capture, and UI Generation continue to bill by their LLM token cost, just as they do in chat workflows.
• Failures and skips are free — A node that errors out, or one that auto-skips because it's not applicable in cron context (Form, Live Chat Escalation, Close Conversation), is not charged.

The Workflow Builder's debug panel surfaces the credit cost of each step so you can see exactly what a scheduled run will cost before you flip it live.

Test Before You Schedule

The Workflow Builder's Test Flow now includes a Cron preview. Run through your scheduled flow exactly the way it'll execute in production — same node-skip rules, same variable shape, same debug timeline — before flipping it live.