Machine-readable version of this same page: /llms.txt.
TerrAlert monitors user-defined geographic areas ("Areas of Interest") for land-use change, using Sentinel-2 optical satellite imagery and an AI change-detection model. A detection is corroborated against independent public data sources (NASA FIRMS active-fire, GLAD and RADD forest-loss alerts, NASA GIBS flood extent, and on Pro and Enterprise, Sentinel-1 radar coherence for construction) before it becomes an alert, which is what keeps the false-alert rate down.
It watches for six categories of change: deforestation, construction and development, flooding, fire, vegetation loss, and urban expansion. Alerts are delivered by email or by webhook, with Slack and Microsoft Teams incoming webhooks detected automatically from the URL.
ESG and sustainability teams monitoring supply chains for deforestation risk; environmental NGOs and conservation organizations tracking protected areas; government agencies and regulators monitoring land-use compliance; insurance companies assessing wildfire, flood and land-change exposure; real estate and infrastructure developers tracking site activity.
A user draws a polygon on a map, or submits one as GeoJSON via the API. TerrAlert then fetches new Sentinel-2 imagery of that area as it becomes available, runs the change-detection model on each new clear pair of images, and once a finding is corroborated per the area's alert policy, sends an alert.
Detection speed is bounded by physics, not TerrAlert: Sentinel-2 revisits a given point roughly every 2 to 3 days, imagery takes about half a day to a day to become downloadable, and cloud cover routinely removes over half of what is left. In practice, expect a detection within about a week of a real change, not same-day. Plan names such as "daily" and "realtime" describe how often TerrAlert checks for new imagery, not how often new imagery exists.
Flat monthly pricing, no per-scene or per-image fees. Every plan runs the full detection pipeline; plans differ in how many areas can be watched, how large each may be, how often it is scanned, and which alert channels are included.
Free, Starter, Growth and Pro are self-serve: create an account, choose a plan, and complete Stripe Checkout. No sales call or human approval is required for these four plans. Enterprise is a negotiated price, requested via the contact-sales form or the in-app Enterprise pricer, and paid the same way, a Stripe Checkout session, once a price is agreed.
Every purchase, on every plan, requires the signed-in account holder to complete Stripe's own checkout and confirm the charge. No integration, API call or automated agent can complete a purchase on a user's behalf without that explicit, authenticated confirmation. There is no endpoint that bypasses it.
A REST API is included on Pro and Enterprise: JSON in and out, JWT bearer authentication using the same session issued at sign-in, GeoJSON for area boundaries, and Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF tiles for imagery. Interactive documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger) is public at api.terralert.io/docs. A written guide is at /docs/api-guide.
Outbound webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed so a receiver can verify authenticity; see /docs/webhook-guide. Slack and Microsoft Teams incoming-webhook URLs are recognized automatically and receive a plain chat message instead of the signed JSON payload.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Stored secrets (webhook signing keys) carry an additional field-level encryption layer. Accounts support multi-factor authentication. GDPR data export and account erasure are available on request. Full detail: /security and the privacy policy.
Detection is not real-time in the sense of minutes: it is bounded by satellite revisit frequency and cloud cover, typically about a week end to end for optical detection. TerrAlert does not publish a single headline accuracy percentage, because a benchmark score on a research dataset does not represent real-world performance across every location. Production alerting instead relies on independent corroboration and a user-configurable confidence threshold. The standard plans (Free through Pro) carry no contractual uptime guarantee; a negotiated SLA is available only on Enterprise.
Support scales with plan: community forum on Free, email with a 48-business-hour target on Starter, priority email with a 24-business-hour target on Pro, and a dedicated contact with a 4-business-hour target (1 hour for a P1 incident) on Enterprise.
This page reflects the production system as of its last deployment. See /changelog for what changed and when, and /llms.txt for the same facts as plain text.
Related: Pricing · FAQ · Developer documentation · Security · Changelog · llms.txt: the same facts as plain text