What a Wake-on-LAN cloud service actually does
A cloud service cannot wake your PC. That sentence is doing real work: a magic packet is a local broadcast, routers do not forward broadcasts, and nothing outside your network can deliver one. What a cloud service actually sells is choreography — an emitter inside your network, a relay outside it, and everything around the wake: proof, schedules, history, other people. Here is how to judge one, ours included.
The shape they all share
An emitter inside the LAN — a plugged-in device or an installed program — keeps an outbound, encrypted connection to the service's relay. Your phone talks to the relay, the relay talks down the held-open connection, and the emitter broadcasts the packet locally. No port forwarding, nothing inbound: that part is table stakes across the category now, and a service still asking you to open a port is telling you something about its age.
Rooster Wake's emitter is a half-watt dongle you put together from about £17 of off-the-shelf parts — the firmware, the case and the bill of materials are open — or the free agent installed on any machine you already leave on. One account can mix both.
What separates them: the answer to "did it work?"
A magic packet is fire-and-forget, so a service that only sends is a button and a prayer. In the free and paid tiers of the wake-on-LAN services we reviewed, we did not find one that probes the machine afterwards and reports what it finds. That is the heart of ours: on the paid plans every wake is followed by a probe, the result lands on your history with the reason when it failed, and the dashboard — installable as an app — pushes the answer to your phone: confirmed up, or failed and why.
The rest of the substance worth checking for
- Schedules that live server-side — wake at eight every weekday, and on the paid plans equally sleep or shut a machine down at seven through the agent. They retry when one does not land, and they can report a failure to a webhook.
- People, without a shared password — invitations with their own sign-ins; on Pro, roles, with power as its own permission.
- Wake links — a revocable URL that wakes one machine, for someone with no account at all, and deliberately nothing more.
- A REST API and webhooks, for wiring a wake into whatever you already run.
- A native Home Assistant integration — machines as devices, wake and power buttons, a machine-is-up sensor — installable today through HACS as a custom repository.
- An exit. Our firmware is open and the reference relay is self-hostable, so if we vanished — or you would simply rather run it yourself — the hardware keeps working and the cloud half becomes optional. We did not find another commercial service in this category that can print that paragraph.
What it costs
The free plan is a real product rather than a trial: one machine, unlimited wakes, from anywhere, no expiry, and its last ten attempts on record. The paid plans start at £12 a year and carry the substance above — the pricing table says exactly which plan carries what.