PermitSnag

PermitSnag is a monitoring service for backcountry permits and campsite reservations. It watches the official booking systems behind places like Half Dome, The Wave and the Enchantments, plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary campsites, and sends an alert the moment a cancellation or a fresh opening shows up. The problem it solves is a familiar one. The permits people want most sell out the instant they're released, and the only realistic way to get one afterwards is to catch a cancellation, which the site says is usually gone again in under six minutes. Refreshing a booking page by hand doesn't work at that speed, and nobody can do it around the clock.

Using it starts with a watch. You pick the permit or campground and the dates that suit you, and PermitSnag scans the systems on your behalf. Coverage runs across Recreation.gov, California State Parks, Utah State Parks and BLM lottery systems, which the site puts at 682 permit types and more than 278,000 campsites across all 50 states. When something opens, you get an alert by email, SMS or push depending on your plan, along with a Fast Lane link that lands you on the official booking page with the site details already worked out. You complete the reservation yourself on that page. PermitSnag's job ends at getting you there quickly, and it never touches the booking itself.

Setting up a watch takes a few minutes and nothing has to stay open afterwards. You search for the permit or campground, set the dates you'd accept, choose how you want to be told, and leave it running on PermitSnag's side while you get on with your day. The a la carte watch allows unlimited date windows, so one purchase can cover every weekend you could make work rather than a single fixed trip. Compared with the usual alternative, refreshing the booking page yourself between meetings or asking a friend to check, the difference is that the checks happen every minute, all day, and the alert reaches your phone wherever you are.

Scan frequency is the part that decides whether an alert is useful. Free watches are checked hourly, which is fine for a quiet campground where openings linger. Paid watches are checked about every minute and are queued ahead of the free ones, which is what you want for a permit that disappears in six. Pro subscribers also get suggestions for similar permits when the one they asked for is full, so a booked-out weekend can turn into a nearby alternative instead of nothing at all. Lotteries get their own tools. Lottery pools let a group combine their applications and track the odds together, friends can join a pool at no charge on the paid plans, and the site publishes win rate data for the major permits so you can see how realistic a trip is before you plan a year around it. A Lottery Season Pass covers a whole application season for a single payment with no renewal, which suits people who apply to several lotteries every spring.

It's built for hikers, climbers and backpackers chasing the high-demand spots, but the campsite coverage makes it just as useful for a family trying to get a summer weekend at a popular state park. The origin is personal. A single engineer missed the Enchantments lottery twice, wrote a script that texted him when openings appeared, and watched it spread through friends and their friends until it became a product. He still builds it in his spare time around a day job, and the company is headquartered in California.

The scale it reports is real enough to matter. Over the last 30 days the about page lists more than 1.3 million availability checks, 6,319 openings spotted and 689 permits watched. What it can't do is guarantee a permit. An alert is a head start, not a reservation, and someone else with the same alert may be faster on the day. Everything it monitors is in the United States, SMS and push alerts need a paid plan, and the whole operation rests on one person's spare time, which is worth knowing before you build a trip around it.

Access is freemium. The free plan gives you one watch with hourly scans and email alerts, and it doesn't ask for a card. A la carte is $19 one time for a single permit family, scanned about every minute until your trip dates pass, with email and SMS alerts, Fast Lane links and unlimited date windows. Pro is $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year for unlimited watches, minute scans, email and SMS, Fast Lane and similar permit suggestions. The Lottery Season Pass is $99 a season, paid once through March 31. Support is at support@permitsnag.com, and there's a help center and an about page on the site.