# Website change alerts: how to get an alarm when something happens online

Builders · https://lfg.gm/alert-when-something-happens-online · Updated 2026-10-17

To get an alert when something happens online, you need two things: a tool that notices the change, and something loud enough to get you off the sofa or out of bed. LFG Alarm, a social alarm clock for iPhone, Android and lfg.gm in a desktop browser, is the loud part. An anything alarm gives you a private link, and any tool that can call a URL (a website change monitor, an uptime monitor, Zapier, IFTTT, GitHub Actions, a cron script) rings your phone through it, and the phones of friends you shared it with. For posts on X and streams or videos on Twitch and YouTube, you need no tool at all: Rocco watches those accounts himself.

## Who notices, and who rings

Most web monitoring tools are good at noticing and poor at getting your attention. They send an email, a push banner or a message in a channel you muted months ago. LFG Alarm does not check pages itself; it turns their signal into an alarm.

| What you want to know | Tool that notices | How it rings LFG Alarm |
|---|---|---|
| A web page changed (a slot opened, a price changed, a "sold out" label went away) | A website change monitor | Its webhook setting calls the alarm's link |
| Your site stopped answering | An uptime monitor | A webhook alert contact |
| Something happened in another app (an email from one sender, a form filled in, a row added) | Zapier, Make or IFTTT | A web request step at the end of the automation |
| A build, deploy or scheduled job failed | GitHub Actions or your CI | A `curl` step that runs on failure |
| Anything you can check with a few lines of code | A cron script | `curl -X POST` when the check passes |
| An X account posts, a Twitch or YouTube channel goes live | Nothing extra | A [post alarm](https://lfg.gm/wiki/post-alarms) |

## How the link works

1. In the app, on **Alarms**, tap **🔮 Anything**.
2. Pick a **Cooldown**, choose private or friends, and tap **Arm it**.
3. Copy the link from the card. Send it an HTTP POST request and the alarm rings.

```bash
curl -X POST https://example.com/lfg-webhook-link
```

Replace the placeholder with your own link. A few things to know before you wire it up:

- **It has to be a POST.** Opening the link in a browser does nothing. Some tools send GET by default; switch them to POST.
- **Nothing you send is shown.** No message, no page title, no payload. The alarm's name is what tells you what happened, so make one alarm per kind of event: "Visa page changed", "Site down", not "Alerts".
- **The cooldown** is the time after a ring during which more calls are ignored: 1, 5, 10, 30 or 60 minutes, 10 by default. A monitor stuck in a loop cannot ring you all night.
- **Test fire** rings only your phone, so you can check the sound before you trust it.
- **New URL** retires the old link at once. Treat the link like a password and change it if it ends up somewhere public.
- **Switched off** answers that it is switched off; **deleted** answers "not found". Your script can tell the difference.

Anything alarms are private or shared with friends you name, and never public, because only you know what sets them off. If you delete one, the friends riding it lose it too: a copy would never ring, since the link belongs to you. The exact behaviour is on the [anything alarms](https://lfg.gm/wiki/anything-alarms) wiki page.

## Recipes for common tools

### A website change monitor

Many website change monitors can send a webhook when a page changes. Point the monitor at the part of the page you care about (an appointment table, a price, a stock label), paste the alarm's link as the webhook, and make sure it sends a POST. A 30 or 60 minute cooldown suits pages that might wobble back and forth.

### An uptime monitor

Most uptime monitors, UptimeRobot among them, let you add a webhook as an alert contact. Add the alarm's link there, share the alarm with whoever should get up with you, and use a 10 minute cooldown so a flapping server rings once, not every check.

### Zapier, Make or IFTTT

End the automation with a web request to the link: **Webhooks by Zapier** with a POST, Make's **HTTP** module with the POST method, or IFTTT's **Webhooks** service with **Make a web request**. Whatever the trigger is (an email from one sender, a new row in a sheet, a parcel marked delivered), the last step rings you. The app's **What's a webhook?** guide includes a prompt you can paste into any AI assistant to be walked through these step by step, without ever sharing your link.

### GitHub Actions

Store the link as a repository secret and add a step that runs only when the job fails:

```yaml
      - name: Ring my phone if this failed
        if: failure()
        run: curl -X POST "$LFG_ALARM_URL"
        env:
          LFG_ALARM_URL: ${{ secrets.LFG_ALARM_URL }}
```

### A cron script

For pages with no monitor, a few lines of shell will do. This rings when a page stops saying "Registration closed":

```bash
#!/bin/sh
# check.sh
if ! curl -s https://example.com/course | grep -q "Registration closed"; then
  curl -X POST "$LFG_ALARM_URL"
fi
```

Run it every five minutes with cron, with the link set in `LFG_ALARM_URL`. Once the page changes, the script calls the link on every run, so pick a 60 minute cooldown and it rings at most once an hour until you stop it.

### A button on your phone

A shortcut that sends a POST to the link (Shortcuts on iPhone can do this with **Get Contents of URL**) becomes a one-tap button that rings everyone on a friends alarm: "we're outside", "the stream's starting".

## No tool needed: X, Twitch and YouTube

For a lot of "something happened online" moments, the place it happens is a social account. A post alarm skips the monitor entirely:

- **On X,** Rocco reads each new post from an account and rings only for posts that mean what you wrote, such as "announces a launch date" or "says the beta is open". Meaning, not keywords, so a post that never uses your word still counts.
- **On Twitch or YouTube,** pick **When they go live** or **When they post a video**.

No X account is needed, only the handle. Post alarms can be private, friends or public, so a creator can post the link and let followers ride along. See [an alarm for when someone posts](https://lfg.gm/alarm-when-someone-posts).

## Choosing a cooldown

| Cooldown | Good for |
|---|---|
| 1 minute | A restock or a button you press yourself, where a second ring a few minutes later means something new |
| 5 minutes | Busy monitors that might fire twice for one change |
| 10 minutes (default) | Uptime checks and failed jobs |
| 30 minutes | Pages that change a little all day |
| 60 minutes | Cron scripts that keep calling until you fix the cause |

## How it rings

- **Android:** a full-screen alarm, even on Do Not Disturb.
- **iPhone:** a time-sensitive alert with the alarm's own sound, which can come through Focus but respects the silent switch, so keep the ringer on.
- **A laptop:** rings only while an lfg.gm tab is open and the laptop is awake and online, for up to ten minutes. Phone browsers never ring. See [alarms on your laptop](https://lfg.gm/alarms-on-your-laptop).

Anything and post alarms need a connection, because the server notices the moment and tells your phone.

## LFG Alarm is not an on-call tool

If a business depends on someone answering, use a real incident tool. In PagerDuty, an escalation policy pages the first person and, if nobody acknowledges before the timeout, moves on to the next level until someone does. incident.io sets who is paged at each level and how long to wait, from alerts or from Slack. Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie in June 2025 and ends support in April 2027, moving its on-call features into Jira Service Management and Compass, so check that before you pick it. Google's SRE book suggests an on-call engineer should face at most two incidents in a 12-hour shift, which shows how much those tools care about paging only when it matters.

LFG Alarm has no rotations, no escalation and no hand-off to a second person. What it does well is the rest of life: a side project, a two-person startup, a page you are waiting on, a group of friends who all want the same ring. It is one link, it rings loudly, and everyone you added hears it at the same moment.

## Three examples

**A visa appointment page.** Lena has checked the same booking page every morning for three weeks. She points a website change monitor at the table of open slots and connects it to an anything alarm called "Visa slot open?", with a 30 minute cooldown. When a slot appears, her phone rings like an alarm instead of adding one more email.

**A side project going down.** Ade and Kofi run a small app between them. Their uptime monitor calls a friends alarm called "Site down", 10 minute cooldown, both of them on it. When it rings, the [wake board](https://lfg.gm/wiki/wake-board) shows who tapped I'm up first, which settles who is looking at it.

**A course that opens without notice.** Mia's university opens extra seats with no announcement. A cron script on her laptop checks the course page every five minutes and calls an anything alarm when "Registration closed" disappears, with a 60 minute cooldown so it does not keep ringing while she signs up.

## Make it in the app

**An anything alarm:**

1. On **Alarms**, tap **🔮 Anything**.
2. Under **Cooldown**, pick **1m**, **5m**, **10m**, **30m** or **1h**.
3. Choose private or friends, and tap **Arm it**.
4. On the card, tap **Copy**, paste the link into your tool, then tap **Test fire**.
5. Open the alarm in [the studio](https://lfg.gm/wiki/the-studio) to give it a name that says what happened and a sound you will not sleep through.

**A post alarm:**

1. On **Alarms**, tap **👀 Social**.
2. Pick **X**, **Twitch** or **YouTube**, type the handle or channel and tap **Next**.
3. On X, write what should wake you under **What should wake you?**. On Twitch or YouTube, tap **When they go live** or **When they post a video**.
4. Choose who it is for and tap **That's it**.

## Common mistakes

- Sending a GET. The link only rings on a POST.
- One alarm for everything. Nothing in the request is shown, so you will not know which monitor rang.
- A 1 minute cooldown on a script that runs every minute. You will be rung every minute.
- Pasting the link in a public repository or a shared doc. Use a secret, and tap **New URL** if it leaks.
- Leaving an iPhone on silent. Anything and post alarms respect the silent switch there.

## Questions

### Does LFG Alarm monitor websites itself?
No. It rings when a tool that does calls its link. Rocco only watches X, Twitch and YouTube accounts, token prices and wallets himself.

### What can call the link?
Anything that can send an HTTP POST: website change monitors, uptime monitors, Zapier, Make, IFTTT, GitHub Actions, a cron script, a phone shortcut.

### Can I put a message in the request?
You can send one, but it is not shown. Name the alarm after the event instead, and make a separate alarm for each kind of event.

### Can a stranger ring my phone?
Only someone who has the link. Keep it private and change it with **New URL** if it leaks.

### Can I share it with my team?
Yes, with friends you name. Anything alarms are never public.

### Can my AI assistant make one?
Yes. Through the [LFG Alarm connector](https://lfg.gm/agents), your AI agent can make an anything alarm, private or for friends, and give you its link, and it can make post alarms for X, Twitch and YouTube too.

## Sources and further reading

- [PagerDuty, Escalation policies](https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/escalation-policies) and [Incidents](https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/incidents)
- [incident.io, Escalating](https://docs.incident.io/incidents/escalating)
- [Atlassian, Opsgenie end of sale and support](https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/opsgenie)
- [Google, Site Reliability Engineering, chapter 11: Being On-Call](https://sre.google/sre-book/being-on-call/)
- [Anything alarms](https://lfg.gm/wiki/anything-alarms) and [Post alarms](https://lfg.gm/wiki/post-alarms) in the LFG Alarm wiki
- [How to make any app, script or feed ring your phone](https://lfg.gm/webhook-alarm)

LFG Alarm is not affiliated with PagerDuty, incident.io, Atlassian, Zapier, Make, IFTTT, GitHub, UptimeRobot or Apple.

## Keep exploring

- [How to make any app, script or feed ring your phone](https://lfg.gm/webhook-alarm.md): An anything alarm is a private link that rings you, and your friends, whenever something calls it.
- [Anything alarms (webhooks)](https://lfg.gm/wiki/anything-alarms.md): A private link that rings your alarm whenever a script, a bot or an app calls it.
- [How to get an alarm when someone posts on X](https://lfg.gm/alarm-when-someone-posts.md): Describe the post you are waiting for; Rocco rings you when it lands.
- [Alert apps compared: the fastest way to alert a person or a group](https://lfg.gm/alert-apps-compared.md): Group chats, Pushover, ntfy, IFTTT, PagerDuty and LFG Alarm: what arrives, what breaks through, and who each is for.

## About LFG Alarm

LFG Alarm is a social alarm clock for iPhone, iPad and Android. It rings for times and for moments (a post on X, a stream going live, a token price, a wallet buying, an event starting), and one shared link makes every phone that joined ring together. Rocco, the cat inside the app, does the watching and the waking.

- Get it on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gm.lfg.app
- Download on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6821089085
- Use it from an AI agent: add the MCP server https://mcp.lfg.gm as a connector, then ask in plain words.
- Every page for agents: https://lfg.gm/llms.txt