Get an alert when your product goes down, even if you work alone.

When you run a product on your own, nobody else notices when it breaks. Barkme checks your site and API around the clock and alerts you when something goes down.

Why your own monitoring isn't enough

Most solo founders start with an error tracker, server logs or a dashboard from the host. Those tools run on or next to the thing they watch. When the server goes down, the DNS breaks or the certificate expires, they go quiet at the same moment, and silence looks just like a good day. A check from outside sees what a user sees. The longer version is in the independent observer problem.

Start on the Free plan

The Free plan has no time limit and needs no card. It includes 3 monitors on one verified domain, checked every minute, with alerts by email. That is enough for your landing page, your API and your login page.

Setup takes a few minutes

You verify your domain by adding one DNS TXT record, which also covers every subdomain. It usually takes about two minutes.

From there, the order is:

1. Verify the domain. Add the TXT record on the apex with host @ and the barkme-verify= token from your dashboard. Barkme keeps checking until it sees the record. Once it does, app., api. and any other subdomain are covered, and the daily domain checks begin.
2. Add three monitors. The landing page, the login page and the API. For the API, point the monitor at a health check endpoint that touches the database and returns a 500 when something is wrong. A plain homepage check can stay green while the app behind it is broken. Barkme sends an HTTP GET and counts any 2xx or 3xx at the end of the redirects as up.
3. Connect a channel. On Free that is your email address. On Founder you can add Telegram, which is a private chat with the Barkme bot, and Slack. Each channel sends a test alert when you connect it, so a broken channel shows up now, before there is an outage.

That is about five minutes from start to a working alert.

Don't lose your domain

If your domain registration expires, your website, API and email on that domain all stop at once. Barkme checks the registration of every verified domain daily and warns you 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before it expires. Each warning is sent once, and the warnings start over after you renew. Your SSL certificate is checked the same way.

This matters more when you work alone. The registrar's reminders go to whatever address you used the day you bought the domain, and the card on file expires sooner or later. To see where your domain stands right now, the free domain expiry checker reads the date without an account.

What an alert looks like at 3am

Your product runs on one small server. At 03:10 the disk fills up with logs, the database stops accepting writes, and your health endpoint starts returning a 500.

The API monitor checks every 30 seconds. The first check fails, Barkme retries two seconds later, and that fails too. Thirty seconds later the next check fails again, so an incident opens, dated back to 03:10. Your phone lights up with a Telegram message: the monitor name, the URL, the time, the error and the phase it failed at. It failed at the response, so the server is reachable and the problem is inside the app.

You clear the logs and restart the database. The next check passes, the incident closes, and a recovery notice gives the total downtime. The incident stays in your dashboard with its start and end times, so you can add log rotation in the morning and know exactly how long users were affected.

A monitor only has one open incident at a time. A long outage doesn't turn into a stream of alerts while you are already fixing it.

When you have paying customers

Founder adds Telegram and Slack alerts, checks every 30 seconds, and up to 30 monitors across 5 domains. Barkme checks again before alerting, and by default opens an incident only after two failed checks in a row, so one slow response does not wake you up.

If you get a down alert while the site works for you, the usual cause is a firewall or rate limiter on your server blocking the checker. The alert names the probable cause when it looks like that, and whitelisting the Barkme prober IP fixes it. See uptime monitoring false alarms for the details.

Give your users a status page

Every plan includes a public status page. It shows 90 days of uptime per monitor, hides the monitor URLs, and is marked noindex so it stays out of search results. On Free it lives on a barkme.dev subdomain. On paid plans you can put it on your own domain, like status.yourproduct.com. When something breaks, a link to the page answers the question your users would otherwise email you.

Which plan fits

Stay on Free while the product is a side project or still pre-revenue. Move to Founder, at $19 a month, once people pay you: Telegram on your phone and 30-second checks are worth it the first time something breaks overnight. Pro, at $39 a month, adds Linear, Trello and a signed webhook, and removes the monitor and seat limits. Most solo founders don't need it. The pricing page has the full comparison, and if you are coming from another tool, how Barkme compares to UptimeRobot covers the differences.