About BestAlarmClock.com
Most online alarm clocks make one polite noise for a few seconds and then give up. That is fine if you were half awake anyway. It is useless if you are the kind of person who switches alarms off in their sleep and has no memory of doing it.
Why this site exists
The interesting thing about failing to wake up is that it is not really a failure of willpower. In the minutes after an alarm sounds, the parts of your brain that handle reaching and pressing are back online, while the parts that handle judgement and memory are not. So a hand reaches out, an alarm stops, and nobody is home to notice.
Once you understand that, the design problem changes completely. You stop trying to build a louder alarm and start trying to build one that a sleeping person cannot switch off. That is what this site is.
What we built
A browser alarm clock with escalating synthesised tones, a screen wake lock so your laptop does not suspend the page, and an optional arithmetic challenge that has to be solved before the sound stops. Around it sit a countdown timer, a stopwatch, a bedtime calculator and a nap timer.
All of it is free, none of it needs an account, and nothing you enter leaves your device.
How we write
Our guides are long because the useful answers usually are. We try to explain mechanisms rather than list tips, to say plainly when the evidence is mixed rather than flattening it into a confident headline, and to tell people when the honest answer is that they need a doctor rather than a different alarm clock.
We also tell people not to buy things, frequently. Most people who cannot get up need to move their alarm across the room and go to bed half an hour earlier. That advice earns us nothing and it is still the right advice.
How the site is paid for
Advertising, and affiliate commission when someone buys a physical alarm clock through one of our links. No brand can pay to be recommended here and we do not publish sponsored content. The full detail is in our affiliate disclosure, including the part where our most-recommended budget clock earns us well under a dollar.
What we are honest about
A browser tab is not a reliable alarm for something that genuinely matters. It cannot survive the lid closing, the battery dying or the machine going to sleep. We say so on the home page, on every alarm page and in our terms, because a tool that overstates itself is worse than no tool.
If missing an alarm would cost you something real, set a second one on a device built for the job.
Get in touch
Corrections, accessibility problems, feature requests and complaints all go to the same place: hello@bestalarmclock.com. We would genuinely rather be told we got something wrong.