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Reeanble use-cases with complete content
When using Claude to ask what is QStash I saw that it try to find `/usecases` , and our current usecases page eventhough not publicly listed still there and can be opened. Claude found it and saw that it is incomplete(there is literally TODO's) on the current master. Instead of removing the page, I filled it with content that references to our other pages/blogs. Next time and AI try to find usecases, this page should be more helpful.
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‎docs.json‎

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"group": "Overall",
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"pages": [
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"qstash/overall/getstarted",
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"qstash/overall/usecases",
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"qstash/overall/pricing",
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"qstash/overall/enterprise",
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"qstash/overall/apiexamples",

‎qstash/overall/usecases.mdx‎

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title: Use Cases
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---
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TODO: andreas: rework and reenable this page after we have 2 use cases ready
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https://linear.app/upstash/issue/QSTH-84/use-cases-summaryhighlights-of-recipes
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QStash is an HTTP-based messaging and scheduling service. You hand it a request,
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and QStash delivers it to your endpoint later — with retries, delays, ordering,
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rate limits, and a dead letter queue when things go wrong.
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This section is still a work in progress.
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That makes it a fit for any work that shouldn't happen inside the request that
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triggered it: tasks that take too long, tasks that must survive a failure, tasks
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that must run on a schedule, and tasks that must not overwhelm the service they
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call.
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We will be adding detailed tutorials for each use case soon.
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Because everything is HTTP, there is no consumer to keep running. Your existing
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API endpoints *are* the consumers, wherever they are deployed — Vercel, AWS
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Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io, or your own servers.
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Tell us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/w9SenAtbme) or
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[X](https://x.com/upstash) what you would like to see here.
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## Background jobs
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### Triggering Nextjs Functions on a schedule
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Serverless platforms cap how long a function can run. Anything heavier than a
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few seconds — video processing, report generation, importing a CSV, calling a
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slow third-party API — risks a timeout, and the user is waiting for it.
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Create a schedule in QStash that runs every hour and calls a Next.js serverless
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function hosted on Vercel.
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With QStash, your handler publishes a message and returns immediately. QStash
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calls a second endpoint that does the real work, retrying if it fails.
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### Reset Billing Cycle in your Database
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```typescript
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import { Client } from "@upstash/qstash";
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Once a month, reset database entries to start a new billing cycle.
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const client = new Client({ token: process.env.QSTASH_TOKEN! });
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### Fanning out alerts to Slack, email, Opsgenie, etc.
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await client.publishJSON({
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url: "https://your-app.com/api/process-video",
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body: { videoId },
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retries: 3,
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});
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```
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Createa QStash URL Group that receives alerts from a single source and delivers them
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to multiple destinations.
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If the job itself is longer than a single function invocation allows, use
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[callbacks](/qstash/features/callbacks) so QStash delivers the response to
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another endpoint once it's ready, instead of your caller blocking on it.
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### Send delayed message when a new user signs up
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<Card
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title="Background Jobs"
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icon="share-all"
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href="/qstash/features/background-jobs"
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>
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Full walkthrough, including local development
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</Card>
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Publish delayed messages whenever a new user signs up in your app. After a
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certain delay (e.g. 10 minutes), QStash will send a request to your API,
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allowing you to email the user a welcome message.
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## Scheduled and recurring tasks
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Anything you would put in a cron job — nightly reports, resetting billing
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cycles, expiring trials, syncing a search index, warming a cache — becomes a
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[schedule](/qstash/features/schedules) that calls your endpoint on a cron
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expression.
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```typescript
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await client.schedules.create({
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destination: "https://your-app.com/api/daily-report",
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cron: "0 8 * * *",
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});
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```
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Schedules run in UTC by default and support
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[timezones](/qstash/features/schedules#timezones). Unlike platform-native cron
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(such as Vercel Cron), schedules are not tied to a deploy, are not limited to
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one per plan tier, and retry on failure.
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## Reliable webhook delivery
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Webhooks are the most common reason people reach for QStash, in both
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directions:
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**Receiving webhooks.** Point Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, or Clerk at a QStash
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publish URL instead of your endpoint directly. QStash absorbs the burst, retries
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if your app is down or mid-deploy, and applies whatever delay, timeout, or
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[flow control](/qstash/features/flowcontrol) you configure. The provider gets a
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fast 2xx even when your processing is slow.
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**Sending webhooks.** If you deliver webhooks to your own customers, QStash
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handles the part nobody wants to build: exponential retries, per-customer
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concurrency limits, and a [dead letter queue](/qstash/features/dlq) for
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endpoints that stay down.
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<CardGroup cols={2}>
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<Card title="Use as Webhook Receiver" icon="webhook" href="/qstash/howto/webhook">
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Publish URLs, URL Groups, and header forwarding
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Building Reliable & Type-Safe Webhooks"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/webhook-system-with-qstash"
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>
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Designing an outbound webhook system on QStash
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</Card>
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</CardGroup>
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## Fan-out to multiple services
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One event often needs to reach several places: a purchase should trigger a
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receipt email, a Slack notification, an analytics event, and a warehouse
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webhook.
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Publish once to a [URL Group](/qstash/features/url-groups) and QStash creates an
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independent, independently-retried delivery for each subscribed endpoint. Adding
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or removing a consumer is a URL Group change — no redeploy of the producer.
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```typescript
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await client.publishJSON({
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urlGroup: "order-created",
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body: { orderId },
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});
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```
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The same shape works for alerting: one alert source fanned out to Slack, email,
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and PagerDuty.
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## Rate-limited and fragile third-party APIs
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When you call an API with a quota — OpenAI, Resend, Shopify, a partner's
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internal service — the hard part is not calling it, it's not calling it too
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often. [Flow Control](/qstash/features/flowcontrol) lets QStash hold messages
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back for you, by request rate, by concurrency, or both.
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```typescript
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await client.publishJSON({
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url: "https://your-app.com/api/summarize",
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body: { articleId },
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flowControl: { key: "openai", parallelism: 5, rate: 60, period: "1m" },
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});
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```
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You can publish ten thousand messages at once and let QStash drip them out at
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the rate your downstream tolerates, instead of building a queue and a limiter
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yourself. Limits apply per key, so the same key can span multiple URLs.
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<Card
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title="Efficient Article Summarization with QStash"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/article-summarizer-qstash-python"
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>
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Handling API rate limits and parallel processing in Python
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</Card>
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## AI and LLM requests
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LLM calls are slow, variable, and expensive to retry by hand — a bad match for a
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10-second serverless timeout. QStash gives them a 2-hour HTTP timeout, delivers
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the response to a [callback](/qstash/features/callbacks) endpoint when it's
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done, and can [batch](/qstash/features/batch) many requests in one publish.
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There are built-in integrations for [OpenAI-compatible
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providers](/qstash/integrations/llm) and [Anthropic](/qstash/integrations/anthropic),
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so QStash calls the provider for you and you only handle the callback.
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Combined with flow control, this is a practical way to run bulk embedding jobs,
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document summarization, or content generation without hitting provider rate
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limits.
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## Delayed and time-based messages
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Some work is defined by *when* it should happen: a welcome email 10 minutes
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after signup, a trial-ending reminder 3 days out, an abandoned-cart nudge, a
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retry of a payment tomorrow.
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[Delay](/qstash/features/delay) a message by a duration or to an absolute
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timestamp, and QStash holds it until then — up to 7 days on the free plan and up
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to a year on pay-as-you-go.
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```typescript
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await client.publishJSON({
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url: "https://your-app.com/api/send-welcome-email",
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body: { userId },
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delay: "10m",
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});
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```
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With the [Resend integration](/qstash/integrations/resend) you can skip the
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endpoint entirely and have QStash send the email itself at the scheduled time.
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<CardGroup cols={2}>
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<Card
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title="Scheduling emails in the user's timezone"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/timezone-scheduling-emails"
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>
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Per-user send times with QStash
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Building an Email Scheduler"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/email-scheduler-qstash-python"
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>
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An email scheduler with the Python SDK
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</Card>
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</CardGroup>
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## Ordered processing
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Some pipelines break if messages overtake each other — applying a sequence of
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updates to the same record, processing a customer's events in order, or writing
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to a system that can't handle concurrent writes.
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[Queues](/qstash/features/queues) deliver messages one at a time in FIFO order.
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The next message only becomes active after the current one is delivered, has
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exhausted its retries, or its callback has finished.
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```typescript
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const queue = client.queue({ queueName: "user-123-events" });
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await queue.enqueueJSON({
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url: "https://your-app.com/api/apply-event",
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body: { event },
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});
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```
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## Syncing and periodic data updates
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Instead of querying a slow or rate-limited third-party API on every request,
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schedule a job that pulls fresh data into your own database, and serve reads
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from there. The same pattern covers flushing Redis state to a primary database,
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refreshing a cache, and rebuilding a search index.
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<CardGroup cols={2}>
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<Card
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title="Periodic Data Updates"
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icon="rotate"
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href="/qstash/recipes/periodic-data-updates"
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>
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Recipe: keep third-party data fresh in your own database
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Sync Redis state to your database"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/syncing-state-with-qstash"
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>
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Write-behind from Redis using QStash
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</Card>
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</CardGroup>
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## Decoupling services
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Beyond individual jobs, QStash works as the messaging layer between your
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services: producers publish, QStash guarantees
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[at-least-once delivery](/qstash/features/at-least-once), and consumers are just
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HTTP endpoints. [Deduplication](/qstash/features/deduplication) keeps retries
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from double-processing, [signature verification](/qstash/features/security)
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proves a request came from QStash, and the DLQ holds anything that never
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succeeded.
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This is the pattern behind cutting serverless costs, too: move expensive work
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out of long-running function invocations and let QStash drive short, cheap ones.
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<Card
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title="Get Rid of Function Timeouts and Reduce Vercel Costs"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/vercel-cost-workflow"
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>
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Why offloading work changes your bill
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</Card>
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## Multi-step workflows
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If your task has several dependent steps — call an API, wait for a human,
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branch, then call another — chaining QStash messages by hand gets awkward.
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[Upstash Workflow](/workflow/getstarted) is built on QStash and gives you
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durable, resumable functions where each step is checkpointed automatically.
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<Tip href="/workflow/getstarted">
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Use QStash directly for single messages, schedules, and fan-out. Reach for
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[Upstash Workflow](/workflow/getstarted) when the logic spans multiple dependent
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steps.
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</Tip>
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## More examples
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<CardGroup cols={2}>
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<Card
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title="Building a seriously reliable serverless API"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/build-reliable-serverless-api"
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>
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Retries, idempotency, and failure handling end to end
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Decouple Webhook Processing on Next.js"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/webhook-qstash"
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>
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Taking webhook work off the request path
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Build a Subscription Service with Next.js & Prisma"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/saas-subscription"
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>
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Recurring billing cycles driven by schedules
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Refresh stale data in a SvelteKit app"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/sveltekit-qstash"
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>
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Scheduled revalidation outside the request path
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Serverless Background Jobs and Message Queues Compared"
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icon="scale-balanced"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/serverless-background-jobs-and-message-queues-every-major-option-in-2026"
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>
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How QStash compares to the alternatives
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</Card>
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<Card
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title="Why We Chose QStash at Scale"
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icon="book"
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href="https://upstash.com/blog/qstash-workflow-at-scale"
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>
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A production user's account of running QStash
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</Card>
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</CardGroup>
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More posts are on the [QStash blog](https://upstash.com/blog/tag/qstash). If
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there's a use case you'd like documented, tell us on
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[Discord](https://upstash.com/discord) or [X](https://x.com/upstash).

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