Community alert 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.
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.
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.
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