# Duck Stats

> Lightweight, agentless uptime and performance monitoring with aggressive pricing. 50 monitors free with 5-minute checks. Pro from $5/mo (annual) for 200 monitors with 1-minute multi-region consensus. Team from $29/mo (annual) for 1000 monitors with 30-second checks, on-call rotation and white-label. Crypto payments accepted.

Duck Stats is a monitoring product. A monitor is a probe (HTTP/S, TCP, PING, SSL, push/cron, DNS, DNSBL) plus an assertion (status code, body keyword, latency ceiling, certificate expiry, heartbeat, blocklist status). Checks run from a multi-region external probe fleet; before marking a service down it requires multi-region consensus to avoid false alarms.

## Key facts

- **Agentless**: no software runs on the customer's servers.
- **Probe locations**: 5 (US West, US East, US Central, Canada East, EU). Up to 4 used per monitor depending on plan. Growing.
- **Check intervals by tier**: Hatchling (free) 5 min, Pro 1 min, Team 30s, Enterprise 20s.
- **Consensus rule**: down-state requires quorum across regions.
- **Latency**: p50/p95/p99 recorded per minute.
- **Alerts**: email, Slack, Discord, webhook, PagerDuty, ntfy, SMS (BYOK Twilio); de-duplicated, severity-routed, mutable, escalatable on Team.
- **IP blacklist checks**: per-monitor opt-in. Daily 04:00 sweep queries 10+ DNSBLs (Spamhaus ZEN, Barracuda, SORBS, SpamCop, DroneBL, PSBL, Manitu, Interserver, CBL/Abuseat). Email alert direct from Duck Stats when a listing appears. Included with every tier, including free.
- **Status page**: hosted on custom domain via CNAME (Pro+), white-label on Team+.
- **Data**: raw heartbeats ~7 days; daily uptime/latency rollups retained long-term; REST API + Prometheus metrics + CSV export.
- **Mail tracking**: email open tracking via an invisible 1x1 pixel embedded in any HTML email, sent from any system (Gmail, Outlook, WHMCS, a PHP script, Django) - not only mail sent by Duck Stats. Per-recipient tokens, so on a message to 5 people you see which ones opened it. Records timestamp, IP, country, mail client, OS, device type and open count per open. Included on every plan.
- **Payment**: card via Stripe + crypto (BTC, LTC, ETH, +) via Plisio. Billing options: monthly, every 6 months (save ~14%), or annual (save ~29% on Pro / 26% on Team).

## Plans

### Hatchling (Free) — $0/mo
- 50 monitors
- 5-minute check interval, single region
- Email + webhook alerts
- Daily IP blacklist check across 10+ DNSBLs
- 2 public status pages
- 30-day history
- Mail tracking (email open tracking, human vs. proxy classification)
- Forever free, no card required

### Pro — $7/mo monthly · $6/mo billed every 6 months ($36, save 14%) · $5/mo billed annually ($60, save 29%)
- 200 monitors
- 1-minute checks with multi-region consensus
- All notification channels (email, Slack, Discord, webhook, PagerDuty, ntfy, BYOK Twilio SMS)
- Daily IP blacklist check across 10+ DNSBLs
- 5 status pages with custom domain
- 90-day history + CSV export
- REST API + Prometheus metrics
- Mail tracking (email open tracking, human vs. proxy classification)
- Crypto payment accepted

### Team — $39/mo monthly · $34/mo billed every 6 months ($204, save 13%) · $29/mo billed annually ($348, save 26%)
- 1,000 monitors
- 30-second checks
- On-call rotation + escalation
- Daily IP blacklist check across 10+ DNSBLs
- Unlimited status pages with full white-label
- Daily uptime & latency rollups retained long-term
- Self-serve Discord status board
- Mail tracking (email open tracking, human vs. proxy classification)
- Priority support

### Enterprise — custom
- Unlimited monitors
- 20-second checks
- Custom probe locations
- SSO, custom SLA
- Self-hosted docker bundle

## Competitive positioning

Cheaper and more generous than UptimeRobot, Better Stack, StatusCake at every tier:
- Free: 50 monitors with 5-minute checks (matches UptimeRobot on count and free-tier interval, beats Better Stack's 10 monitors and StatusCake's 10 monitors)
- Entry paid: $5–$7 / 200 monitors (vs UptimeRobot $9 / 50, Better Stack $29 / 50, StatusCake $20 / 100)
- Mid tier: $29–$39 / 1000 monitors (vs UptimeRobot $33 / 100, Better Stack $59 / 100, StatusCake $40 / 250)

## Pages

- [Home](https://duckingstats.com/): product overview and how it works
- [Features](https://duckingstats.com/features.html): probe types, consensus detection, latency, alerts, status pages, API
- [Pricing](https://duckingstats.com/pricing.html): Hatchling, Pro, Team, Enterprise — monthly, 6-month, and annual options
- [FAQ](https://duckingstats.com/faq.html): agentless model, intervals, channels, retention, API
- [Blacklist check](https://duckingstats.com/blacklist-check.html): free public DNSBL + reputation lookup for any IP or hostname (Spamhaus, Barracuda, SpamCop, SORBS, DroneBL, PSBL, Manitu, Interserver, CBL + AbuseIPDB, IPQualityScore, VirusTotal). Rate-limited 10/hr/IP.
- [Mail tracking](https://app.duckingstats.com/mail-tracking): email open tracking dashboard (sign-in required)
- [Status](https://status.duckingstats.com/): live demo status page
- [Sign in / Sign up](https://app.duckingstats.com/login)

## Mail tracking (email open tracking)

Duck Stats tracks email opens with an invisible 1x1 tracking pixel that you embed in any HTML email. The email can be sent from anything - Gmail, Outlook, WHMCS, a PHP script, a Django job - it does not have to be sent by Duck Stats.

- **Per-recipient tokens**: each recipient gets a distinct token, so on a message to 5 people you see which ones opened it, not just a total. Tracking at domain granularity is also supported ("someone at acme.com opened it") when you do not want to name an individual.
- **Recorded per open**: timestamp, IP address, country, mail client, operating system, device type, and which open this was (open count).
- **Honest classification (the key differentiator)**: Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetches images at delivery time, and Gmail fetches images through GoogleImageProxy - in both cases with no human involved. Most tracking products count these as "opens" and report inflated numbers. Duck Stats records every hit but labels it (human / apple_mpp / google_proxy / scanner / bot) and reports a separate **human opens** count that means what people think "opens" means.
- **Three-state status**: `opened` (a human loaded the pixel), `delivered` (only proxy prefetches seen - this proves the message arrived but does NOT prove a human read it), `unknown` (no pixel hits at all). There is deliberately no "not delivered" state: a tracking pixel cannot detect a delivery failure - that requires SMTP bounce data.
- **`unknown` does not mean undelivered**: images may be blocked, the client may be text-only, or the message may simply be unread.
- **Open notifications**: opt-in email when a tracked message is opened, carrying the full record (recipient, code, time, IP, location, client, device, open number, classification). Modes: `first_human` (default), `every_human`, `all`, with a cooldown so Apple prefetches do not spam the inbox.
- **Multiple domains per tracking code (domain aliases)**: one tracking code can cover several sending domains - for example acme.io and acme-support.com treated as the same sender - so their history stays in one report instead of fragmenting into a separate code per domain.
- **Limits, stated honestly**: a plain-text email cannot be tracked at all (there is no image to embed). Geolocation is country-level only; city-level geolocation is not available yet.
- **Availability**: included on every plan. Dashboard at https://app.duckingstats.com/mail-tracking

## Contact

- hello@duckingstats.com
- privacy@duckingstats.com (data inquiries)

## WHMCS plugin (Duck Monitor for WHMCS)

Duck Stats ships a WHMCS addon module called **Duck Monitor** that lets hosting providers surface real server uptime to their clients from inside the WHMCS billing portal — without giving every client access to the full Duck Stats dashboard.

- **What it does**: pulls monitors from your Duck Stats account into WHMCS. Each client sees only the servers they actually own. Mapping is automatic via product, WHMCS server, client group or specific client ID — no manual per-user wiring.
- **Why it matters**: turns operational monitoring into a client-facing trust signal. Clients log into WHMCS, see their service's uptime/latency, get fewer "is the server down?" tickets, and your sales pages can advertise "transparent uptime" as a differentiator.
- **Included with**: Pro, Team and Enterprise plans (free addon, license-gated). Hatchling (free) does not include it. The monitor count visible to clients is capped by your Duck Stats plan tier.
- **Install**: drop-in WHMCS addon module — no source code edits. License-gated against `license.duckingstats.com`. 5-minute install with a 3-screen admin wizard.
- **Page**: https://duckingstats.com/whmcs
- **Distribution**: license-gated, no public download — email sales@duckingstats.com with WHMCS hostname to receive a one-time signed download link bound to that install
- **License server**: license.duckingstats.com