Being there is the whole job.
Restocks open and close inside a few minutes. Price mistakes get corrected before lunch. The change that matters shows up unannounced, sits briefly, and leaves. Same shape everywhere: the ticket page that flips from “Sold out” to “Find tickets” at 10:02, the status page that goes from Operational to Degraded at 3 AM, the DMV calendar that drops one Tuesday slot a week. The manual answer is a thumb on the reload key and a morning you don’t get back.
Stakeout’s free tier stands at the page so you don’t have to. Any tab, on any interval from 5 seconds to 30 minutes — or a custom number from 2 seconds to 24 hours. Turn jitter on and each reload moves by up to ±15%. A countdown badge sits on the toolbar icon, so a glance tells you when the next reload lands. Pause, resume, or stop each tab on its own, and if the page navigates, the schedule re-arms itself instead of dying with the URL.
And it tells you the second it opens — one monitor is included free, desktop alerts on. Pick one element on any page. Stakeout reloads on your interval, hashes that element’s text after every load, and fires a desktop notification on the first load where the hash differs. No time limit, no watermark: the same check a Pro monitor runs, capped at one at a time.
Pro is the plan, not the product yet: unlimited monitors, keyword triggers for text that appears or disappears, and cloud checks that keep running after you close the browser — $4.99 a month, or $39.99 a year, when it ships. The alert is interval-bound by design: Stakeout tells you on the first reload where the change shows up, and claims nothing about the gap in between.