Keep the warnings free.
WxAlerts has no ads, no data sales and no paywall on anything safety-related. It runs on what the people who use it give. If it has ever woken you up in time, this is the ask.
Is a subscription a donation?
No, and the difference is worth being plain about. A subscription buys capacity for you: more places, more recipients, more messages. A donation buys alerts for somebody who is not paying. Both keep the service running and only one of them gets you anything, which is exactly why we would rather you knew which one you were doing.
Wanted the capacity instead? See the plansWhat you are actually paying for.
None of this is a server sitting idle. Here is what it is doing right now, while you read this.
- 142
- Active alerts
- 1,243,891
- Strikes
Three alert feeds, raced
Every NWS product is pulled from three independent sources at once and whichever copy lands first is the one you get. Two of those feeds are redundancy you only notice when one of them stalls.
Our own radar and basemap
The radar worker and the tile archive are ours, so the map is not hotlinking somebody else’s server and does not go dark when they decide they have had enough of us.
The lightning broker
GOES-19 flashes stream to every open map from a broker that holds all of those connections at once, which is the part of this that never idles.
Texts and phone calls
A page view costs a fraction of a cent. A text message and a phone call cost real money every time one goes out, and those are the two that wake somebody up at three in the morning.
No money? Still helps
Other ways to help
Neither of these costs you anything, and the second one makes the whole service harder to knock over.