Ask HN: What tools do you use to alert users?

3 points·atlas3651··2 comments

I'm curious what tools or services you use to alert end-users of something very important that's happening, for instance, a partial outage, a change in your T's & C's or policies, an upcoming deadline for user action, a scheduled maintenance, a temporarily disabled feature (e.g. experienced too much load), etc. Do you have a tool that enables this kind of thing without deploying new code every time it comes up?

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If you're doing this DIY, for the email side there are transactional email services made for this (SendGrid, Mandrill, PostMark, etc.). For texting there is Twilio, SignalWire, etc. For status pages there's, well, StatusPage. I think AWS probably has similar services to most of those too.

For in-app messages, shouldn't the content of the notifications be separate from the code itself? The code should be able to pull the latest notifications from some dynamic data store (be it a database, KV, redis, or whatever), just as a basic JSON or whatever. You shouldn't have to deploy any new code for that.

Apparently there's a SaaS called Courier.com that can do all this in one integrated system, but I've never used them.

Nah, not DIY. I was curious about in-app notifications, yes, and you're right about a dynamic data store. But that's another service to maintain and support, so it never seems to get on the roadmap. Also, sometimes the messages need something special like a checkbox "I agree to new T&C's", etc, which requires new code (at least, the first time round), and storage of who agreed and didn't.

Hadn't heard of Courier.com so will check that out.

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