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Cron Translator MCP Server

by crontoenglish Your server? Claim it
not responding

Cron Translator is listed as active in the registry but did not answer our last check. It exposes 3 tools.

Explain cron expressions in English, list next run times, and catch scheduling gotchas.

The linked repository no longer exists on GitHub — it was deleted or made private.

Uptime history 20 days of history · worst day 1%
20 days agonow
2.2%
Uptime 24h
2 of 92 checks
3
Tools
read from the server
959 ms
Response time
average over 24h
open, no key
Access
streamable-http

What changed 1

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 3 September 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

3 Sep a tool description was rewritten build_cron

Cron Translator does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 3.4% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 0 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add cron-translator --transport http https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cron-translator": {
      "url": "https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.cron-translator]
url = "https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cron-translator": {
      "url": "https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cron-translator": {
      "url": "https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 3

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

build
build_cron
Convert an English schedule description into a standard five-field cron expression, then explain and validate the result. Use this when a user describes a schedule in words and needs the expression. This is a RULE-BASED converter, not a language model: it handles a fixed grammar and returns an error listing the supported phrasings when a phrase falls outside it. That refusal is deliberate — a plausible-looking wrong schedule is worse than no answer. If a phrase is rejected, rephrase it into one of the supported shapes and call again. Returns the expression, which rule matched, any words the rules did not use (check these — leftover words may mean the phrase was misread), the English description of the result, warnings, and the next run times.
explain
explain_cron
Translate a cron expression into plain English, list its upcoming run times in a specific timezone, and report the gotchas that make schedules misfire. Use this whenever a cron expression needs to be read, verified, or explained — and prefer it over reasoning about the expression directly. Cron has several counter-intuitive rules that are easy to get wrong: day-of-month and day-of-week are combined with OR (not AND) when both are set, steps like */7 do not divide their field evenly, dates like February 30 never fire at all, and daylight-saving transitions skip or repeat runs. This tool checks all of them. Returns the normalised expression, a one-sentence description, a per-field breakdown, a list of warnings with severity and a fix for each, the next run times as both UTC ISO 8601 instants and local wall-clock strings, and an approximate runs-per-day figure.
next
next_cron_runs
List the next run times for a cron expression in a specific timezone, with no prose. Use this when the only question is "when does this next fire" — for example to check whether a job will run before a deadline, or to show a user their upcoming schedule. Do not compute these dates yourself: weekday arithmetic, month lengths, and daylight-saving shifts make manual calculation unreliable. Returns each run as a UTC ISO 8601 instant plus a local wall-clock rendering in the requested timezone. Refuses Quartz-only syntax (L, W, #, ?) rather than guessing.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://crontoenglish.com/api/mcp streamable-http answering 242 ms 0 min ago

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Cron Translator — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Cron Translator do?
It exposes 3 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: build_cron, explain_cron, next_cron_runs. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Cron Translator working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 2 of 92 checks got a reply (2.2%), average response time 959 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
Is Cron Translator still maintained?
The linked repository no longer exists on GitHub — it was deleted or made private. We show this because it changes what you can expect: an unmaintained server may keep answering for months and then stop without warning.
The registry lists Cron Translator as active — why does it not respond?
The official MCP registry stores what the author submitted; it does not verify that the server still runs. We check the endpoint ourselves, and this one does not answer. Catalogues that copy the registry without checking will show it as working.
How do I connect Cron Translator?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Cron Translator need an API key?
No. Cron Translator completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 3 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Cron Translator?
It answers our handshake in 959 ms on average, which is faster than 12% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.