Cities and public services
Water off in three streets. A road closed for a burst main. A recycling round moved by a public holiday. The things that are too small for the news and too important for a noticeboard nobody passes.
One message. Every subscribed phone.
The channel your town already needed
Claim a handle, print it on a poster, and say the thing once. Everyone who subscribed gets it — a burst main, a closed road, a cancelled train, a school on lockdown. No app store listing to maintain, no phone numbers to collect, no mailing list to keep clean.
drop.top/antwerp-alerts
Free up to 100 subscribers · No card to start · A handle is yours permanently
Who runs one
Anyone with something people need to hear
The common thread is not size. It is that the message matters more than the medium, and that the people who need it already know who you are.
Schools and universities
A closure, a lockdown drill, a bus that is not coming. Parents subscribe once at enrolment and stop having to watch a group chat that fills up with everything else.
Venues, festivals and transport
A stage running late, a gate change, a platform swap, weather closing a site. Tens of thousands of people, one message, no wristband scanning and no wifi to fight over.
Ops and on-call teams
A sealed channel your rota subscribes to by invite code. Not listed anywhere, not findable by guessing the handle, and it reaches a phone that has your team on it rather than an inbox nobody reads at 03:00.
The honest part
A channel asks. The phone decides.
This is the whole model, and it is worth reading before you choose us over something that promises more. Every channel declares what it would like to be able to do. Each subscriber grants those one at a time, on their own handset, and can take any of them back later without unsubscribing.
1
Normal
A notification in the shade, like any other. This is the floor, it needs no permission at all, and it is what an unpermitted channel gets no matter what it asked for.
2
Important
A heads-up banner with a sound, if the subscriber allowed this channel that. Worth spending on a road closure that changes somebody’s next twenty minutes. Not worth spending on a newsletter.
3
Urgent
May take over the screen, override Do Not Disturb and speak the text aloud — every one of those separately granted, and any of them refusable. This is the rung for evacuations and lockdowns, and a channel that spends it on a car-park closure loses it the same afternoon.
Priority is a ceiling, never an outcome. We cannot promise you that an alert will ring, and we would rather say so here than let you find out during the emergency you bought us for. What we can promise is that the message arrives.
How it works
Four steps, and the first one is the only irreversible one
There is no onboarding call and no integration project. The slowest part is deciding what to call yourself.
Claim a handle
It becomes drop.top/your-handle, permanently. It cannot be edited afterwards — it ends up printed on posters and encoded into QR codes, so choose it the way you would choose a street name, not the way you would choose a password.
Put it where people are
A poster in a school entrance, a line in the enrolment email, a QR code on a festival gate, a link in a footer. We generate the QR for you and it points at your public page, which explains what the channel is and what it asks for.
Say the thing once
Write the instruction, not the topic — “Bus 34 is not running today, walk or take the 12” beats “Transport update”. Attach a picture, a map or a document if it helps. Send now, or schedule it for when it will actually matter.
See what happened, honestly
How many could be reached, how many phones reported reading it, how many acknowledged. Three real numbers and no invented fourth.
Location
Narrow it to a circle, without ever knowing where anybody is
A flooded underpass matters to the four streets around it and to nobody else. You can draw that circle. What you cannot do — what nobody here can do — is find out who is inside it.
The circle is on the map, not in a database
You draw a centre and a radius in the console. That is what gets sent: the shape, attached to the alert.
The comparison happens on the handset
Every subscriber receives the alert, and each phone checks its own position against the circle locally and decides whether to show it. We hold no subscriber location, so there is no column to leak, subpoena or lose.
It narrows, it never widens
A geofence can only make an alert reach fewer people than subscribed to the channel. It can never add somebody who did not.
It fails open
A phone that cannot work out where it is shows the alert rather than hiding it. When the two failure modes are “somebody got a message meant for the next town” and “somebody missed an evacuation”, that is not a close call.
Because the check is on the device, a subscriber who has not granted location simply sees everything the channel sends. That is a design decision, not a gap.
The numbers
Three figures we can stand behind, and the one we will not print
Most tools in this category will show you a delivery rate. We cannot, because there is no per-device delivery record anywhere in this product — that is what makes sending to four million people cost the same as sending to four.
Could reach
How many devices subscribe right now. Not how many subscribed when you sent it — those are different numbers and we label this one so nobody confuses them.
Reported read
Phones that opened the alert and told us so. A self-report from a device that chose to send one, which is exactly as much as anybody can honestly claim.
Acknowledged
Somebody tapped the button that says they have seen it and are acting. The number that matters when the message was an instruction.
What you will not find is a “delivered” count or a read rate across alerts. Both would be numbers we invented, and a figure nobody can stand behind is worse than a gap where one should be.
Pricing
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 should not cost the same. Each channel carries its own plan; everything lands on one invoice per workspace.
Free
€0
/month
A street, a club, a small school. Enough to find out whether people actually subscribe.
100 subscribers 100 alerts / month
- 100 subscribers
- 100 alerts / month (per subscriber reached)
- Normal priority
- Text and image alerts
Pro
€9
/month
A neighbourhood, a secondary school, a venue. Adds the important rung and richer alerts.
1,000 subscribers 10,000 alerts / month
- 1,000 subscribers
- 10,000 alerts / month
- Important priority
- HTML and document alerts
- Overage at the metered rate
Business
€49
/month
A town, a campus, a festival. Adds urgent priority, geofencing, and the API.
10,000 subscribers 100,000 alerts / month
- 10,000 subscribers
- 100,000 alerts / month
- Urgent priority and full-screen requests
- Geofencing and location rules
- API keys, webhooks & MCP
Enterprise
Contract
A city, a network, a national service. Contract terms and no caps.
∞ subscribers ∞ alerts / month
- Unlimited subscribers and alerts
- Contract billing
- Set by drop.top staff
Alerts are metered by how many subscribers an alert could reach when you sent it. Go over and the extra is billed at the metered rate rather than the channel going quiet — an alert that does not go out because of a plan limit is the wrong failure.
Use cases
Start from what you are trying to say
A counter, a workshop, a waiting room, a rota, a family. Every line below opens a page that explains exactly how it is done — and what the phone at the other end is still free to refuse.
- I want to tell people at the counter that their order is ready, without shouting a name across the room. Telling diners their order is ready
- I run a garage or a dealership and I want to tell a customer their car is ready for collection. Telling customers their car is ready
- I want to notify my patients about appointments, about results being in, and about the surgery being closed. Notifying patients at a practice
- I am a vet and I want to confirm appointments and tell owners when their animal can be collected. Alerts for a veterinary practice
- I run a hotel and I want to tell arriving guests that their room is ready, and tell everybody about tonight’s timings. Telling guests their room is ready
- I run a pharmacy and I want to tell people their prescription is waiting, without holding their phone number. Telling patients a prescription is ready
- I want my AI assistant to put a notification on my phone when it has finished something or found something. Getting notified by your AI assistant
- I want my monitoring, my CI or my alarm system to reach the phone in my pocket. Monitoring alerts on your phone
- I want to tell customers that their order is bagged and waiting in the shop. Click-and-collect alerts
- I need to find cover for a shift tonight without ringing eleven people one at a time. Shift cover and rota alerts
- I share the school run and I want to tell the other parents when I am running late. Carpool and school-run alerts
- I want one place to reach my family that is not a group chat everybody has muted. A private channel for the family
Developers
Everything the console does, your code can do
There is no separate integration surface. The console calls the same API you would, with the same rules, the same rate limits and the same error envelope.
A REST API you can read in an afternoon
One key, one POST, one alert. Scoped credentials, so the script that sends can be forbidden from deleting. A key can be bound to a single channel.
Webhooks that are signed
Sends, cancels and subscriptions, pushed to your endpoint with a signature you can verify. No polling us for something you already know happened.
An MCP server for assistants
Point Claude or another assistant at it and it discovers the rest itself — OAuth, no pasted keys, revocable per client, and narrowed to the scopes you approve on a consent screen you read first.