Why an alert might not reach you

Last updated 15 September 2026

ESTRA works. It will also, eventually, miss something. This page lists every way that can happen, says plainly whose problem each one is, and tells you what I do about the ones that are mine.

Most products bury this. I would rather you read it before you buy, decide it is acceptable, and never be surprised — than have you find out at 3am and feel cheated.

The chain

For an alarm to sound, seven things have to work in order:

TradingView decides your alert condition has been met
TradingView sends the webhook
The internet carries it to the relay
The relay accepts and queues it
Your unit asks the relay for it, and gets it
Your unit plays the sound
You hear it

Break any one and there is no alarm. Steps 1 and 2 are TradingView. Step 3 is the public internet. Steps 4 and 5 are partly mine. Steps 5 to 7 depend on your home. Here is the full breakdown.

Your side

Things at your end that stop the alarm

These are outside my control entirely. If one of these happens, ESTRA did not fail — it was never reached, or it was reached and you could not hear it.

Your internet is down. No connection, no alert. The unit cannot invent one.
Your wifi changed. New router, new password, renamed network — the unit needs setting up again.
The unit is unplugged, or your power went out. There is no battery.
It is out of wifi range, or too many walls away from the router.
Your network is 5GHz-only. ESTRA joins 2.4GHz. Ask me before ordering if you are unsure.
The volume is down, on the unit or on the speaker.
Your armed window excluded it. If you set 22:00–08:00 and the alert fires at 21:45, it is ignored on purpose. This is a feature and it will bite you if you forget it.
Cooldown suppressed it. A second alert inside your cooldown window is deliberately dropped so one chatty alert cannot fire forty times.
Your TradingView alert was paused, deleted, or expired. TradingView alerts do not always live forever — check yours.
Your TradingView plan lapsed. Webhooks are not on the free tier. If you drop to free, ESTRA stops receiving anything.
The webhook URL was pasted wrong, or into the wrong alert.
The alert was configured differently than you thought — once per bar, once per bar close, only on crossing. That is TradingView's setting, and it is yours to get right.
You slept through it. It happens. It happens with every alarm clock.

Third parties

Things neither of us controls

I have no more influence over these than you do, and no advance warning of them.

TradingView is down, or its alert engine is degraded.
TradingView delays or drops the webhook. Webhook delivery is best-effort on their side, not a guaranteed service, and under heavy market load things queue.
An internet or DNS problem between TradingView and the relay.
My hosting or database provider has an outage. I chose them, so I will tell you when it happens — but I cannot prevent it.

My side

Things that are my fault, and what I do about them

I am not going to pretend these do not exist or hide behind a disclaimer for them.

A bug in the device software that stops the alarm sounding.
A bug in the relay that loses or misroutes an alert.
A bad update I shipped that broke something that was working.
The relay being down because I did not pay for it, did not scale it, or did not notice it was broken.
Not enough capacity if far more units are in use than I planned for.

If the cause is on this list: tell me and I will fix it. If I cannot fix it, you get your money back, regardless of how long you have had the unit. That is the trade — I take the software, you take your wifi.

How you find out something is wrong

A silent alarm clock looks exactly like a working one. That is the actual danger, and it is what most of the design effort went into:

A chirp every morning, at a time you choose. If you stop hearing it, something is broken — and you learn that at 8am rather than at 3am.
The unit checks in constantly. If it stops checking in, that is visible rather than silent.

If the morning chirp stops, do not assume it is nothing. It is the one signal that proves sound is actually reaching the room.

Keep a second alarm for anything that genuinely matters. Not because ESTRA is unreliable, but because single points of failure are a bad idea regardless of what the product is. I use one. You should too.

What you are agreeing to when you buy

Before any purchase, you will be asked to confirm you have read this page and accept the following. It is repeated here so you can read it now, without a checkout in front of you:

ESTRA is a consumer alarm clock. It is not a medical, fire, security, or emergency device, and I am not using it as one.
No alert is guaranteed to arrive or to arrive on time. I have read the chain above and I understand alerts can be missed.
I am responsible for my side — my internet, my wifi, my power, my TradingView subscription and alert configuration, and the settings I choose on the device.
Andrew Tessier is responsible for the device software and the relay service, and will fix or refund failures caused by them.
I will not rely on ESTRA as my only safeguard for anything I cannot afford to miss.
I accept that trading losses are excluded. If an alert is missed and a trade goes with it, that loss is mine, and I have read the terms that say so.

What this does not take away

None of the above removes your right to a refund under the returns policy, your rights if the unit is faulty, or any consumer protection that cannot be signed away. If ESTRA does not wake you and the reason is on my list, you are not stuck with it.