School closure notifications
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.
Three rungs, and each one costs something
Normal is a notification in the shade and needs no permission at all. Important is a heads-up banner with a sound, if the subscriber allowed this channel that. Urgent may take over the screen, override Do Not Disturb and be read aloud — each granted separately, each refusable. The rung is a ceiling rather than an outcome, and it is also a budget: a channel that spends Urgent on a car-park closure loses the permission the same afternoon, from the only people who could have granted it.
Draft, schedule, send — and what cancelling cannot undo
Composing and sending are deliberately different permissions, so the person or script that writes an alert can be forbidden from publishing it. A scheduled alert becomes visible at its time without anything having to run at that minute, which means a server that was briefly down delivers late rather than never. Cancelling is honest about its limits: it stops an alert reaching phones that have not fetched it yet and does nothing at all to the phones that already have it. An alert cannot be unsent.
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.
Questions, answered plainly
When should I use urgent priority?
When somebody needs to act in the next few minutes: an evacuation, a lockdown, a genuine safety instruction. Not for a schedule change, and not for anything that would still be fine to read an hour later. Urgent is granted by subscribers one at a time and withdrawn just as easily, so it behaves like a budget rather than a setting.
Can I unsend an alert?
No. Cancelling stops it reaching phones that have not fetched it yet, and does nothing to the ones that already have it. Compose as a draft and read it back before you send; that habit is worth more than any undo button we could offer.
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.
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