Cron was a calendar app acquired by Notion in 2022 and relaunched as Notion Calendar in 2024. Learn its history, features, and current status.
Researched and fact-checked by Bartu Cavusoglu · Updated July 19, 2026
Cron (cron.com) was a calendar application founded in 2019 by Raphael Schaad, built for professionals and teams who wanted a faster, more keyboard-driven, and more visually polished alternative to default calendar apps like Google Calendar or Apple Calendar. It went through Y Combinator's 2020 batch, raised a 3.5 million dollar seed round, and launched publicly in 2021, earning recognition as Product Hunt's productivity app of the year that year.
The app offered features such as keyboard shortcuts for quick navigation and scheduling, support for multiple time zones and a world clock view, availability sharing, meeting templates, and integration with video conferencing tools, and it connected to Google Calendar accounts, drawing comparisons to the earlier, well-loved Sunrise Calendar app.
In June 2022, Notion Labs, Inc. announced its acquisition of Cron for a reported eight-figure sum, with founder Raphael Schaad and his team joining Notion while Cron initially continued operating as a standalone app.
In January 2024, Notion retired the separate Cron brand and relaunched the product as Notion Calendar, an integrated calendar app built on Cron's technology but now deeply connected to Notion's databases and documents, allowing calendar events to link directly to a user's broader Notion workspace.
It is important not to confuse the Cron calendar app with the Unix and Linux cron job scheduler, a long-standing, unrelated system utility used to automatically run scheduled commands or scripts on a server. Despite the shared name, they have no corporate, technical, or historical connection.
This profile covers only the Cron calendar app, cron.com, founded by Raphael Schaad, its acquisition by Notion, and its continuation as Notion Calendar, not the Unix cron scheduling utility.
No. Cron was retired as a standalone, separately branded app in January 2024 after Notion acquired the company in 2022; its technology continues as Notion Calendar.
Notion Calendar is the direct successor to Cron, built on the same underlying technology after Notion's 2022 acquisition, but integrated into the broader Notion productivity suite with links to Notion pages and databases.
Cron was founded in 2019 by Raphael Schaad, a Swiss-born software engineer and designer, and the company went through Y Combinator's 2020 batch.
Notion announced its acquisition of Cron in June 2022, in a deal reported to be worth an eight-figure sum.
No, they are completely unrelated. The Unix and Linux cron utility is a decades-old system tool for scheduling automated command-line tasks, while Cron, cron.com, was a consumer and team calendar application.
No, the standalone Cron app was retired in January 2024; users were transitioned to Notion Calendar, which continues to be actively developed.
As a standalone product, Cron's exact historical pricing details are not the focus of current documentation since it was retired; its successor, Notion Calendar, is offered free as part of the Notion ecosystem.
Cron was based in San Francisco, California, prior to its 2022 acquisition by Notion.