402cron vs Amazon EventBridge

402cron

A public OpenAPI 3.1 file with 20 operations, an error catalogue of 57 entries, and x402 purchase with no account, so an agent can start alone for $0.02. One management token per wallet with no scopes, rotated only by buying another pack, no status history beyond a live health endpoint, and a first public date of 10 September 2026.

Amazon EventBridge

IAM policies scope a credential to single actions and buses, and an SLA commits 99.99 per cent monthly uptime per Region. The Custom Event Bus API of 24 September 2026 adds retention, replay, ordering and publish-time deduplication. Classic PutEvents takes no idempotency token and answers 200 for a bus that does not exist. A person must open the AWS account.

402cron

1. Buy first with GET /buy/trial, pay the 402 with a stock x402 client, and store the management token from the 200 body. It's shown once; losing it costs another purchase with ?rotate=1.
2. Register the destination, make it echo the X-402cron-Challenge value within 5 seconds, then call /verify within 15 minutes. A fixed-response catch URL can't pass.
3. Branch on the error code and the HTTP status, never on message. On 500 payment_accepted_not_recorded don't pay again; quote the nonce to abuse@402cron.com.
4. Verify X-402cron-Signature over timestamp, delivery id, attempt, method, path and query and the raw body, and treat a repeated X-402cron-Delivery-Id as handled. Delivery is at least once.
5. Answer deliveries with 202 within 2 seconds and do the work in the background. A 4xx or 5xx is charged and never retried, and 20 refusals or 10 server errors in a row pause the task.
6. Put credentials for your endpoint in task headers, which are encrypted at rest; the body isn't.

Amazon EventBridge

1. Use aws eventsv2 and the EventBridgeV2 SDK client for the Custom Event Bus, but write IAM actions with the events: prefix. A policy naming eventsv2: grants nothing
2. After a Classic PutEvents call, check FailedEntryCount and each entry's ErrorCode, then resend failed entries yourself. A request holds up to 10 entries and under 1 MB
3. Set SystemMetadata.DeduplicationId on Custom Event Bus entries when retrying a publish, and treat a SuccessCode of DEDUPLICATED as success
4. Set RetryPolicy and OnFailureConfiguration when creating a subscriber. The defaults stop after 5 attempts or 300 seconds, and an exhausted event is dropped
5. Store the full bus ARN. A Custom Event Bus ARN ends in a generated identifier that changes when a bus of the same name is recreated