How Barkme works.

Barkme sends an HTTP GET to your URL on the interval you pick. A 2xx response counts as up.

Everything else counts as down - a 3xx redirect, a 4xx or 5xx, a timeout, or a DNS or TLS failure. Each monitor has its own timeout, from 1 to 120 seconds.

We confirm before we bark. A failed request is retried after two seconds, and it takes two consecutive failed checks before an incident opens - four failed requests in total. A single blip will not wake you.

So a 30-second monitor alerts in about a minute, and a 5-minute monitor takes five to ten. The incident is backdated to the first failed check, so the confirmation window still counts against your uptime.

You pick one of four intervals per monitor: every 30 seconds, every minute, every 2 minutes, or every 5 minutes.

The Free plan is limited to 5 minutes, Founder unlocks 1-minute checks, and Pro unlocks all four including 30 seconds.

You can only monitor domains you own or operate. Add a TXT record on the apex with host @ and the value barkme-verify= followed by the token we show you - it usually takes about 2 minutes.

Verifying an apex covers every subdomain and every URL beneath it, so you only do this once per domain.

An incident opens with the failing status code and the time of the first failure. A monitor only ever has one open incident at a time, so a long outage does not turn into a stream of alerts.

It resolves on the first successful check - we are slow to open and quick to close - and you get a recovery notice with the total downtime.

Through the channels you connect: email, Slack, Telegram, Linear, Trello, or your own webhook. Linear and Trello open an issue or card when an incident starts and close it when the site recovers, so you never triage a resolved alert.

A channel must be verified before alerts fire - we send a real test alert through it. You can mute a channel any time without deleting it.

Email and Telegram are personal channels. Free includes one email address and no Telegram. Founder unlocks Telegram too, five of each. Pro has no limit on either.

Slack, Linear, Trello and custom webhooks are shared - they post to one destination for the whole team, so each team gets exactly one of each, and only an owner or admin can set them up.

You give us an HTTPS endpoint and we POST every incident and domain-expiry alert to it as JSON. Each request carries an X-Barkme-Signature header - an HMAC-SHA256 of the timestamp and the raw body, using a signing secret we show on the channel.

Recompute that digest on your side to confirm the request came from Barkme. The exact payload shape is shown on the channel page when you connect it.

Barkme checks every verified domain once a day and warns you 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before its SSL certificate or domain registration expires. Each threshold fires once, so you are not nagged daily, and you can toggle both alerts per domain.

These go to your email, Slack, Telegram and webhook channels. Linear and Trello only handle incidents.

A live uptime page per project you can share with clients - on a barkme.dev subdomain, or your own custom domain on paid plans. Custom domains need a TXT record to prove ownership and a CNAME to point at us.

Monitor URLs are never shown, you can rename each monitor for the public view, and the page is marked noindex so it stays out of search results. It shows 90 days of uptime and refreshes about every minute.

An owner has full control and is the only person who can manage billing. An admin can rename the team, invite and cancel invitations, and set up shared channels - but cannot remove members or change the plan. A member uses the dashboard without managing the team.

Invitations expire after one day, so send a fresh one if someone misses it.

Free: 3 monitors, 1 domain, 5-minute checks, email alerts. Founder: 30 monitors, 5 domains, 1-minute checks, email, Slack and Telegram. Pro: unlimited monitors, 50 domains, 30-second checks, every channel including Linear, Trello and custom webhooks.

Pro adds the integrations, the 30-second interval, and removes the volume caps.

The team owner can switch plans any time from the account settings. Cancelling means switching to Free, and it applies straight away rather than at the end of the billing period. Payments are handled by Paddle, our merchant of record.

If you end up over the limits of the smaller plan, we pause the extra monitors rather than deleting anything - your oldest monitors keep running, and you can re-enable the rest whenever you upgrade again.