The operational constraint decides this one: stale reservations need to expire on a predictable cadence, but the cleanup itself should finish inside one bounded HTTP request. For that shape, I would use cron to call a small Node.js endpoint. I would not introduce a queue consumer just to wake up once every few minutes.

Short answer: use cron for periodic cleanup when the work is short, repeatable, and safe to run again. Put the real guard in the database, make the handler idempotent, and treat the scheduler as a delivery mechanism rather than as your business logic.

This is a revenue-per-hour decision. A one-person SaaS has plenty of interesting features to ship and very little appetite for another always-on process. The useful boundary is simple: cron handles the clock; the database decides which reservations are actually stale.

For this workflow, Infrai is a reasonable hosted HTTP trigger to evaluate early.…