Terms
What the service does, and what it cannot promise
An alert you send is written to our systems and made available to every device subscribed to that channel. That is the whole of what we can guarantee, and it is worth being precise about the rest.
We cannot promise that any alert will ring, take over a screen, or be spoken aloud. Priority is a request made to the handset. Whether it becomes a sound, a banner, a full-screen takeover or a silent line in a notification tray is decided on the device, by the permissions that subscriber granted your channel and by their own system settings — both of which they may change at any time without telling you or us. A channel with no granted permissions reaches its subscribers as an ordinary notification, whatever priority it asked for.
drop.top is not an emergency service and must not be relied on as the only way of reaching anybody in danger. Phones are switched off, out of coverage, out of battery and in the hands of people who have muted them. If a message must arrive, it needs a second route that does not depend on a handset you do not control.
Your handle
A handle is claimed, not owned: it is unique across the service, first come first served, and it cannot be edited after creation because it ends up printed on posters and encoded into QR codes. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates a public body, a business or a person who has a better claim to it, or one registered only to keep it from somebody else. Where we do, we will say so and give you the chance to move.
What you may not send
- Anything unlawful, or anything intended to harass, defraud or endanger a person.
- Alerts that impersonate an emergency service, a public authority or another organisation — including a channel name, description or artwork that would lead a reasonable subscriber to think you are one.
- Marketing dressed as an alert. People subscribe to a channel expecting to be interrupted when something happens; spending that on an offer is the fastest way to lose the audience and the permissions.
- Urgent priority for anything that is not urgent. It is the rung that can override Do Not Disturb, and a channel that spends it carelessly will have it removed.
Suspension
We may suspend a channel or an account that breaks the rules above, and we will say why. A suspended account keeps its data and its record of what it has sent; it stops being able to send, and every API key it holds stops working at the same moment. Suspension is not deletion.
Subscribers are not your list
A subscription belongs to a device, not to a person, and the records you can see are pseudonymous: a platform, an app version, a language, a time zone. There are no names, no email addresses, no phone numbers and no locations, because the service never collects them. You may not attempt to re-identify a subscriber, and there is no export that would let you.
Subscribers may leave at any time, and may withdraw any single permission without leaving. Neither is something you can prevent or be notified of individually.
Plans, metering and payment
Plans are per channel, so a quiet internal channel and a busy public one are priced separately, and every channel in a workspace is settled on one monthly invoice.
- Free — € 0,00. Up to 100 subscribers and 100 alerts a month.
- Pro — € 9,00 a month. Up to 1,000 subscribers and 10,000 alerts a month.
- Business — € 49,00 a month. Up to 10,000 subscribers and 100,000 alerts a month.
- Enterprise — set by contract, with no caps, and billed separately.
An alert is metered by the number of subscribers it could reach at the moment you committed to sending it — when you press send, or when you schedule it. Cancelling a scheduled alert before it is due refunds its meter; cancelling one that has already gone out does not, because it already went out.
Going over the included volume does not silence a channel. The excess is billed at € 0,40 per 1,000 alerts, because an alert that fails to leave because of a billing limit is the wrong way for this product to fail. Going over the subscriber cap is different: new subscriptions past the cap are queued rather than refused, receive nothing, are told so, and are released oldest first when the cap rises.
Invoices are issued monthly in arrears, in euro, with VAT applied according to the country and VAT number on the workspace. A plan change takes effect when the invoice carrying it is paid. Payment is taken by our payment provider; card details never reach our systems.
The API and connected assistants
Everything the console does is available over the API on the same terms. A credential carries scopes and may be bound to a single channel, and you are responsible for what is sent using one you issued — including by an assistant you connected. Connections are revocable per client at any time from your account.
An alert cannot be unsent. Cancelling stops it reaching devices that have not fetched it yet and does nothing at all to the ones that already have it. Treat sending as irreversible, because for a large part of your audience it is.
Availability and change
The service is provided as-is, without a service-level agreement. We will not delete your channels or your sending history without telling you. The documented API is additive within a major version: it gains fields and endpoints and does not rename or remove them, so a client that ignores what it does not recognise keeps working.
Still to be decided
The legal entity, the governing law, the notice period for changes to these terms, the retention period for sending history, and the dispute process. Real answers are needed before this page becomes an agreement.