StakeoutAuto Refresh Plus
Chrome extension · restocks, tickets, status pages · free tier

Be there when it opens.

Stakeout reloads the tab on a schedule that never blinks, and rings your desktop the moment the words you watch change. You arrive while the thing is still there.

Install Stakeout — Free One monitor included free. No account, no card.
shop.example.com/retro-runner-ember
Retro Runner ‘Ember’
Sail / ember orange · US 8–13
$210
SOLD OUT
reloaded 11:52:47 AM

The manual morning: one thumb, one key, one button that never changes while you watch.

F5
847
reloads, by hand
one tab · one morning
7:04 AM

The restock can land any minute — or in four hours. The shop doesn’t say.

9:18 AM

Sold out. Reload. Sold out. Reload. Nothing moves but the clock.

11:52 AM

847 reloads later, the drop lands the minute you step away.

shop.example.com/retro-runner-ember
Retro Runner ‘Ember’
Sail / ember orange · US 8–13
$210
SOLD OUT

Stakeout’s popup: pick an interval, press Start once, and the toolbar icon counts down the rest of the day.

F5
23s
The takeover

Pick an interval — five presets, or type your own — and press Start once.

Random jitter

Switch jitter on and every reload drifts a touch early or a touch late. No two gaps alike.

The badge

The toolbar icon counts down to the next reload while you get on with the day.

shop.example.com/retro-runner-ember
12s
Retro Runner ‘Ember’
Sail / ember orange · US 8–13
$210
SOLD OUT
ADD TO CART
watching · button text

Stakeout watches one element’s text and rings your desktop the moment its words change. One monitor, included free.

Stakeout — change detected shop.example.com · “Add to Cart” appeared
Element watch

Mark one element — the buy button, the price, a stock line. Stakeout hashes its text after every reload.

3:07 AM

The text changes, the hash breaks, the alert fires. The tab was watching. You weren’t.

Included free

One monitor, no time limit, no watermark — the same check a Pro monitor runs. Tonight’s drop is a fine first test.

Any page with words

Point it at a ticket page, a status page, a court docket, a hiring board. Anything whose words change when something happens.

Why this exists

Being there is the whole job.

The change that matters is brief. The ticket page flips from “Sold out” to “Find tickets” at 10:02, the restock opens and closes inside a few minutes, the status page goes Degraded at 3 AM. The manual answer is a thumb on the reload key and hours of “still nothing” that end the moment you look away.

Stakeout stands at the page so you don’t have to. Every tab gets its own schedule — seconds apart for a drop, hours apart for a docket — with a countdown badge on the toolbar icon, and a schedule that re-arms itself if the page navigates. One monitor is included free, desktop alerts on: mark one element, and the first reload where its words change rings you.

Flat night illustration: a car parked across the street from a closed shop with a warmly lit window, a coffee cup steaming on the dashboard
Parked across the street until the lights come on.
shop.example.com/retro-runner-ember
30s
Retro Runner ‘Ember’
Sail / ember orange · US 8–13
$210
SOLD OUT
ADD TO CART
watching · button text
5s30s1m5m30mcustom
25.5s · 34.5s · 27.1s · 32.8s
Stakeout — change detected shop.example.com · “Add to Cart” appeared

Stakeout runs a schedule per tab.

What ships in the free tier

Set it per tab. Read it at a glance.

Intervals

Five presets — 5s, 30s, 1m, 5m, 30m — plus a custom field that takes seconds or minutes, from 2 seconds to 24 hours. Each tab keeps its own schedule; a 2-second sneaker page and a 6-hour status page run side by side.

Stakeout runs a schedule per tab

Countdown badge

Compact time to the next reload, on the icon itself: 45s, then 4m, then 1h. You never open the popup to check — the toolbar answers before you ask.

Stakeout’s countdown, on the icon

Random jitter

Off by default; one toggle per tab turns it on. Each reload then moves by up to ±15% of the interval — on a 30-second setting, between 25.5 and 34.5 seconds. Never an exact metronome, which is what a rate limiter watches for.

Stakeout, never on a metronome

Element watch 1 free, then Pro

One click marks an element. After every reload, Stakeout hashes its text and compares. First difference, desktop alert — with the site name and what changed.

Stakeout watches one element’s words

The honest part

Five limits you should know before you install.

01

Chrome clamps extension alarms to 30 seconds. Below that, Stakeout drives reloads with a 1-second tick. If Chrome suspends the background worker mid-run, timing recovers within one alarm period — at most 30 seconds late.

02

Refreshers are per browser session. Quit Chrome and every refresher and the monitor reset — tab ids don’t survive a restart. Leave the window open overnight and the watch holds. Checks that outlive the browser are exactly what the Pro cloud tier is for.

03

The monitor compares the element’s text. An image swap, or a colour change with identical text, won’t trigger it. Pick an element whose words change — a button label, a price, a stock line.

04

Above one minute, the badge rounds. It shows compact time — 4m, 1h — not exact seconds. The popup always has the precise countdown.

05

The monitor rides on that tab’s refresher. Arm one and Stakeout starts a 30-second refresher if the tab has none. Stop that refresher and the monitor stops with it. Arm a monitor somewhere else and the first one is replaced — one at a time, on the free tier.

Never aim a refresher at a virtual waiting room.

Queue pages detect reloads and can send you to the back of the line — or out of it. Point Stakeout at the product page or the drop calendar instead. The alert fires on the next reload after things open; the queue is yours to join by hand.

Pick the slowest interval that still wins.

A 5-second refresher on a shop that restocks twice a week is 60,000 requests for two events, and it is what rate limiters are built to spot. Start at 30 seconds with jitter on. Move to 5 seconds only in the last ten minutes before a known drop time. For a status page or a calendar, 5 minutes is plenty and it will still beat the email.

Mark the words, not the picture.

Stakeout hashes the text inside the element you mark. Mark the buy button, the price, the stock line, the status word — anything whose letters change. Marking the product photo or a colour swatch will never fire.

At install, Stakeout asks for five permissions: alarms storage tabs scripting notifications — timers, your settings, reloading the tab, reading the one element you mark, and showing the alert. Site access is requested per-site, only at the moment you arm a monitor there — never up front, never everywhere.

Pricing

Two tiers. The free one is not a demo.

Flat night illustration: an empty desk chair, a monitor glowing with a single orange notification, a wall clock reading 3:07, a crescent moon in the window
3:07 AM. The chair clocked out. The tab didn’t.
Start here

Free

$0forever

Everything the reload key did, minus you.

  • A refresher on every tab you open — each on its own schedule
  • Five preset intervals, plus a custom field in seconds or minutes
  • Random jitter, on by choice per tab
  • Countdown badge on the toolbar icon
  • Pause, resume, stop — per tab
  • Schedule survives page navigation
  • 1 element monitor — desktop alerts on, no time limit, one at a time
Install Stakeout — Free

No account. No card. Five permissions, and no site access until you point at an element.

Pro

$4.99/mo. — or $39.99/yr — when it ships

Not on sale yet. Here is what it will add.

  • Everything in Free
  • Unlimited element monitors
  • Keyword triggers — text appears or disappears
  • Checks that keep running with Chrome closed
  • Free monitor keeps working either way
See what ships free

Pro is not built yet. The Upgrade button inside the extension says “coming soon” and takes no card.

F5 · off duty

The reload key gets the day off.

Free forever, no account, set up in under a minute. Point it at the page you’re tired of checking, press Start once, and let the tab do the waiting.

Flat morning illustration: the same shop at 10 AM, door open with a green OPEN sign, the parked car’s driver door open, its driver already inside the store
10:02 AM. Doors open. You’re already parked outside.

Install this build in four steps

Stakeout is not on the Chrome Web Store yet. Until it is, it loads unpacked in under a minute.

  1. Open chrome://extensions
  2. Turn on Developer mode, top right
  3. Click Load unpacked and pick the 03-auto-refresh folder
  4. Pin Stakeout from the puzzle-piece menu, open any tab, press Start refresh

Copied

Chrome 121 or newer · free tier, no account · site access only when you arm a monitor