BackupBeacon

Most backup failures are silent: the job stopped running weeks ago and nobody noticed. Backup plugins grade themselves. BackupBeacon is the independent watchdog that does not. How it works

1. Add each backup destination (UpdraftPlus to Drive, database dumps to S3, your host's nightly snapshots) with a freshness limit in hours.
2. Point your backup job at the token-authenticated ping endpoint: POST /wp-json/backupbeacon/v1/ping/<destination-id>?token=.... Every successful backup pings; the token is rotatable and pings are rate-bounded.
3. BackupBeacon evaluates every destination hourly (WP-Cron): fresh, stale (past its limit), or silent (never recorded, or a clock-skewed future timestamp). Backdated recordings are refused.
4. When a destination turns stale or silent, the site admin gets an email and a persistent admin notice - once per incident, not once per cron tick. A dashboard widget rolls every destination into one ALARM/OK beacon, and the event log records when each destination went stale and when it recovered.

No account, no external service, no per-site fees. Your backup jobs ping your own site; the watchdog runs where the backups matter. Optional premium plans unlock faster checks (15-minute cadence), more alert channels (Slack/Discord/webhook), escalation and maintenance windows, per-destination alert routing, a status API, multisite and white-label agency tooling. Upgrades happen inside your dashboard - no reinstall, no license-key copying - and every feature you use today stays free forever. What it is not: BackupBeacon does not make backups. It is the alarm for the tools that do.

3.6.1

• Ship the Freemius SDK in the wp.org package (lib/freemius/) so wp.org installs get the opt-in prompt, Account page, license activation, and in-dashboard upgrades - same code on both channels, as documented.
• Fix: stale/silent evaluation used whole-hour floor math, so a 2h limit only tripped at 3h+. Limits now compare exact seconds.
• Fix: on hosts that block loopback (which breaks WP-cron), evaluation now also runs lazily when the BackupBeacon admin page loads, so alerts and the event log keep working.

3.6.0

• Fix (BB-OPTS-002): alert and premium settings forms no longer wipe each other - options save merges per section instead of replacing wholesale.
• Studio: white label - agency name replaces the product name on screens, alerts, and emails.
• Studio: audit export bundle - one JSON download with destinations, settings, acknowledgements, and the full event log.
• Studio: multisite network mode - network admin rollup of every site's beacon state.

3.5.0

• Premium plans via Freemius: in-dashboard checkout, automatic license activation, no license-key copying.
• Starter: 15-minute evaluation cadence, 2,000-entry event log, per-destination alert email routing, snooze/mute.
• Pro: webhook alerts (Slack/Discord/custom), escalation repeats, maintenance windows, CSV event-log export.
• Accelerator: multi-channel fan-out, incident acknowledgement, status API for external dashboards, ping payload validation.
• Studio: multisite network mode, white label, signed audit export bundles.
• All 3.4.1 features remain free and unchanged.

3.4.1 Self-hosted admin fonts (no remote font requests). 3.4.0 Token-authed REST ping endpoint per destination, hourly WP-Cron evaluation, email + admin-notice alerts on stale/silent transitions, event log (last 200), dashboard widget, rotatable token. 3.3.1 Real freshness beacon replacing the generic template engine.