Push notification channel
Everything below rests on one rule: a channel asks, and the phone decides. What arrives is guaranteed; how loudly it arrives is not, and any page that told you otherwise was selling.
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.
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.
Four subscribers or four million, same message
Sending does not fan out into per-recipient work: an alert is written once and each phone asks for what it has not seen. That is why the cost and the speed do not change with the size of the audience, why there is no queue to drain and no per-message price to negotiate. It is also the reason the honest-numbers section reads the way it does — the same design that makes it cheap is what makes a delivery receipt impossible.
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.
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.
Does it get slower or more expensive as we grow?
No. An alert is written once and each device asks for what it has not seen, so four million subscribers cost the same to send to as four. Your plan caps how many subscribers a channel may have, but the send itself does not change shape.
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