Alerts for housing associations
The common thread is not size. It is that the message matters more than the medium, and that the people who need it already know who you are.
One handle, printed once, permanent
A channel lives at drop.top followed by its handle, and that address never changes. It cannot be edited after creation, because it ends up on a poster in a school entrance, on a festival gate and inside a QR code somebody has already laminated. The page behind it explains what the channel is, what it asks a phone for, and how to subscribe — so a stranger reading a poster can decide before installing anything. We generate the QR code for you, server-side, and it is never sent to a third-party image service.
Draw a circle without knowing who is inside it
You place a centre and a radius on a map, and the circle travels attached to the alert. Every subscriber’s phone receives it and compares its own position locally, then decides whether to show it. No subscriber position is ever sent to us, which is why this is a design fact rather than a promise: there is no column anywhere that could hold one. Two consequences follow deliberately. A geofence only ever narrows — it cannot add somebody who did not subscribe. And it fails open: a phone that cannot work out where it is shows the alert rather than hiding it, because missing an evacuation is worse than seeing one meant for the next street.
Priced per channel, so the quiet one stays free
A school’s internal staff channel and its public parent channel are not the same size and are not charged the same. Each channel carries its own plan and everything lands on one invoice per workspace. The free tier is a real tier rather than a trial: no card, no countdown. Alerts are metered by how many subscribers an alert could reach when you committed to sending it, and going over bills the excess rather than silencing the channel — an alert that fails to leave because of a billing limit is the wrong way for this product to fail.
Questions, answered plainly
Can I change my handle later?
No, and that is on purpose. It gets printed on posters and encoded into QR codes, and a handle that could change is a handle that turns somebody’s laminated sign into a dead link. Choose it the way you would choose a street name.
Do you know where my subscribers are?
No. The circle is sent with the alert and each phone compares its own position locally. We hold no subscriber location, so there is nothing to leak, subpoena or lose. A phone that cannot determine its position shows the alert rather than hiding it.
What happens if we go over the plan?
Extra alerts are billed at the metered rate rather than being refused: an alert that does not go out because of a billing limit is the wrong failure. Going over the subscriber cap is different — new subscriptions are queued, receive nothing, are told so, and are released oldest first when the cap rises.
Do subscribers need an account?
No. They install the app, subscribe to a handle, and that is the whole of it. Only the person running the channel signs up for anything.
Say it once. Every subscribed phone gets it.
Free up to 100 subscribers, no card to start, and the handle is yours permanently.
Start a channel