Repair status 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.
What this actually looks like
Half the calls a repair shop takes are “is it ready yet”. A sealed channel answers all of them at once: the ticket number, the status, and the price if it changed. Customers join with the code on the repair docket and stop reading once the job is collected.
How you would set it up
- Create a private channel and print its invite QR code on the repair docket.
- Post one line per ticket — received, quoted, finished — so a customer can follow their own number.
- Say when you close. Most complaints about a repair shop are about the collection, not the repair.
Private means sealed, not merely unlisted
A private channel is not one that is simply missing from a directory. It requires an invite code both to subscribe AND to read anything about it, and a request without one gets exactly the same “not found” as a handle that never existed — because a different answer would let anybody confirm that a school’s or an ops team’s channel exists by guessing its name. Invite codes can carry a use limit and can be revoked; revoking is a timestamp and by default removes nobody who already joined.
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.
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
Can somebody find my private channel by guessing the name?
No. A sealed channel answers a request without an invite code with exactly the same “not found” that a nonexistent handle gets. There is no response that distinguishes “this exists but you may not see it” from “this does not exist”, because that difference is itself a leak.
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.
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