Telling diners their order is ready
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
A number board and a raised voice both work until the room is full. A channel does the same job on the phone already in the customer’s hand: you send “Order 42 — ready at the counter”, and every phone subscribed to your place sees it. Nobody is identified, because the ticket number is all anyone needs to act on.
How you would set it up
- Create a public channel on the restaurant’s name and print its QR code on the ticket, the menu and the counter.
- Send one line per order: the ticket number and where to collect it. Normal priority — a plate is not an emergency.
- Keep the urgent rung for the day you genuinely need it: a closure, a gas leak, clearing the terrace.
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.
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.
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.
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