Lockdown alerts
Setting this up takes about a minute. The slow part is not the software — it is deciding what to call yourself, because the handle ends up on a poster and cannot be changed afterwards.
Three rungs, and each one costs something
Normal is a notification in the shade and needs no permission at all. Important is a heads-up banner with a sound, if the subscriber allowed this channel that. Urgent may take over the screen, override Do Not Disturb and be read aloud — each granted separately, each refusable. The rung is a ceiling rather than an outcome, and it is also a budget: a channel that spends Urgent on a car-park closure loses the permission the same afternoon, from the only people who could have granted it.
A channel asks. The phone decides.
Every channel declares what it would like to be able to do: make a sound, show a banner, override Do Not Disturb, take over the screen, speak the text aloud. Each subscriber grants those one at a time, on their own handset, and can take any of them back later without unsubscribing. Nothing a channel asks for is granted by asking. The loudest thing an unpermitted channel can achieve is an ordinary notification — which still arrives, and still says what you wrote.
Three numbers, and the one we will not print
You get: how many devices could be reached at the moment you sent, how many phones reported opening the alert, and how many acknowledged it. What you do not get is a delivery rate, because there is no per-device delivery record anywhere in this product — that absence is exactly what makes sending to four million people cost the same as sending to four. Reads and acknowledgements are self-reports from handsets that chose to send one, and they are labelled as such rather than dressed up as receipts.
Questions, answered plainly
When should I use urgent priority?
When somebody needs to act in the next few minutes: an evacuation, a lockdown, a genuine safety instruction. Not for a schedule change, and not for anything that would still be fine to read an hour later. Urgent is granted by subscribers one at a time and withdrawn just as easily, so it behaves like a budget rather than a setting.
Can you guarantee my alert will make a sound?
No, and nobody honestly can. Whether it makes a sound is decided on the handset by what that subscriber granted your channel and by their own settings. What we guarantee is that the alert reaches every subscribed device. Any service promising more is either wrong or is describing a carrier cell broadcast, which is a different thing entirely.
Why is there no delivery rate?
Because there is no per-device delivery record anywhere in the product, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than a gap. A phone’s inbox is a query over sent alerts, which is what makes the cost independent of audience size. We would rather show three numbers we can stand behind than a fourth we invented.
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