Alert delivery rates, explained
This page is written for somebody who has been sold a delivery guarantee before and found out what it was worth. So it starts with the limits rather than ending with them.
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.
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
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.
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