Show HN: Made a new notification tool and I'm looking for some beta testers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Made a new notification tool and I'm looking for some beta testers

notify17.net

64 pointscmaster1152 comments

Hi everyone!

I've been working in DevOps for quite a while now (> 1yr) and have always been a full stack developer, always involved in developing from end to end.

Due to my background, two years ago I started noticing I lacked a tool to monitor better what happened around my systems, which would push me notifications whenever I wanted, with whatever kind of content. After starting doing DevOps I realized i desperately needed such a kind of tool (I'm very well aware and use many monitoring products, but none of the kind I desired).

Long story short, after 2 years of working weekends and early-raise mornings, I finally managed to put together Notify17 ( https://notify17.net ), which is a tool I'm now using every single day to receive custom notifications (on iOS for now) from the most disparate sources (e.g. Graylog, Grafana, Jenkins).

I'm looking for anyone who'd like to try it out with beta-tester benefits, which means just using the tool whenever you feel like and have an extended free tier (free tier for some good time, 3 months at least), with the purpose of seeing if it could fit into daily life as a companion tool, as well as to get some feedback about the overall functionalities.

Edit: for who's interested as beta user, please just drop your email address at beta@notify17.net after you log in once into the dashboard ( https://dash.notify17.net ).

Edit 2: for who's interested in knowing when the Android app will come out, I made a little mailing list you can subscribe to at the bottom of the homepage.

Thanks a lot, Alberto

Android. Subscribed. I have some servers that self monitor their mail queue with a simple bash watchdog script. Unfortunately the only notification method I have is... email. This will be a great way to get notifications for the servers. I can see some basic bash stuff coming that'll help me out without having to go full-out nagios for 4 small web server VPSs.

Thanks for the interest XP Android will come!

I tried to make Notify17 as usable as possible with the fewer amount of setup, so bash is a thing :)

I'll let you know when Android is out!

For self-monitored systems that "chug along" in the background it's also nice to have a Dead Man's Switch style monitoring: set up the bash watchdog to send regular "I'm still alive" messages to an external service. The external service then notifies you whenever these heartbeat messages stop (bash script crashes, system runs out of disk or RAM, system loses network connection, VM gets accidentally terminated, etc. etc.).

There's a number of monitoring services implementing this idea, and I'm also building one of them as an open source project – link in profile.

Extended free-tier? But the site says there's a free forever plan?

It's just for beta testers, meaning this will be temporary (3 months for now, with good chance it will be renewed or made permanently). The biggest challenge here is determining what a good number is for a free tier, to help small users properly and not impact on the business for bigger ones.

Ah yes, the classic temporary "free forever" plan.

Edit: Sorry for the snark, I misunderstood you.

No, this free forever is meant to stay and get bigger in the future.

This post is talking about a way much bigger plan for beta testers, which I want to keep going in the future too.

There will always be a free forever basic plan, because I'm a developer myself, and I know how much I do hate services that ask you for the CC when creating an account :)

Uncaught Invariant Violation: Minified React error #185; visit https://reactjs.org/docs/error-decoder.html?invariant=185 for the full message or use the non-minified dev environment for full errors and additional helpful warnings. at e.exports (https://dash.notify17.net/async.vendors~main.edfeb73f1ceaca5...)

Hi! Thanks for the notice, is this error still happening?

This is exactly what I've been looking for! I'm building a custom chat portal for my personal website and I needed some way to get pinged whenever I'm away from my end of the system.

Your pricing, however, seems really high. As an individual I'd graciously pay my dues just to support this, because I think it's an idea worth supporting with the right audience in sight (as opposed to PushBullet et al which are more for non-technical consumers), but I feel like it would be hard for sysadmins inside big corps to convince their bosses to bite the bullet on $60 per 4000 notifications when the corp may be sending out 40-50k notifications a day all to different personnel.

Is this intentional? Do you want to restrict the use of this tool to a few hobbyists to avoid having to put too much effort into scaling up to handle those loads? I just put my startup hat on and I'm curious as to how you determined the pricing.

The pricing for the moment is intentional. My first category of end-users and single customers.

I originally envisioned Notify17 to be a personal hub, more than an enterprisey tools (in the beginning clearly. If business grows, sure the model will change).

I'm not trying to compete on tools like PagerDuty, which already do their jobs very well. For now, Notify17's main goal is alerting/reporting on a smaller scale.

From a startup perspective, the team is building up, it's in a phase where the main features are working, it's no more a prototype (backend/iOS), but how users will want to use the product is still a question (therefore the call for beta users). I want to have a solid set of features that I know users will use before trying any big jump.

Is this a different product from AWS SNS ($1.00 per million) or Twilio push (10000 free per month, then 0.00025 each)?

https://aws.amazon.com/sns/pricing/

https://www.twilio.com/notify/pricing

Hi, I'll copy the same answer from a previous post ( https://new.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bmujjg/made_a_new_n... ):

Amazon SNS is not a competitor of Notify17 in first place, because SNS is a general purpose publish-subscribe system, while Notify17 is a solution that accepts HTTP payloads, and processes them to generate notifications, which you can see in a web browser or on the iOS app (in future also Android one). They're conceptually a lot different.

Because of this core difference, I cannot say there's any plan to compete with SNS.

Thank you for the quick reply. I see what you mean and I'm excited to begin using this. I'll definitely send some emails if I find any bugs or have any ideas, best of luck to you!

Thanks a lot! :D

Looks very nice. Best of luck.

For me, the killer feature for any pushover competitor would be support for actionable notifications which trigger a webhook callback when the button is clicked.

To be honest, I'm not sure that's even possible with iOS's notification framework. I don't know whether the notification payload can define which buttons are displayed, or if they need to be defined ahead of time in the app. But if it could be done I would be all over it.

Weeeell, it's in the planssss :D :D :D Happy to let you know, when it will happen in the future!

Shameless self-promotion: I did something similar for Android called Simplepush (https://simplepush.io). However be careful: one of the features (Simplepush events) is currently not working on Android 8 or newer.

Eheh well, self-promotion is kinda vital for who makes his own product! ;)

Question, how was using Scala on Android? :O

Pushover works exactly like this, except they have a one-time fee and a daily quota, which I am fine with.

I am finding out more and more they're not competing products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017

I don't understand you. Not competing products as in:

1. You don't want anyone to stop using pushover to convert to your product?

2. Your product is so good it is not even a competition?

3. You just want to dismiss any competitors in some vague way?

I'm sorry, I must have explained myself badly earlier.

Notify17 and Pushover share some competing features, clearly, because both are notification services. From that point of view, there can be competition, no discussion about it.

At the current moment, however, I feel they have different visions. I want Notify17 to be, at least in its initial phases, a personal/small team tool, more than a mass distribution one. I want user to personalise their notifications, and integrate Notify17 in their workflow. More than targeting 10s of thousands of notifications to huge groups, I imagine more single users or small teams creating their own templates world.

I'm not excluding that, as Notify17 will grow, it could become a competitor of Pushover. Especially when the alerting features will grow and improve. They're just targeting, in my pure opinion and for this initial growth phase, a different user base and a different vision.

Nice work! Just signed up and am testing sending some AWS Alarms for Elastic Beanstalk via a template. One problem I've come across straight away is that your templating engine doesn't seem to be able to handle JSON arrays.

The EB notification JSON body that gets POSTed by the SNS Topic contains a Record[] structure with the messages, and when I try to setup {{ Records[0].Sns.Message }} in the template, I am getting a "template: notification-content:2: unexpected bad character U+005B '[' in command" error.

Cool!!

You can access arrays with `{{ index .myArray 0 }}` ( https://notify17.net/docs/templates/#arrays ). Notify17 uses golang templates :)

Can confirm that works. :) I am not familiar with GoLang, but using {{ (index .Records 0).Sns.Message }} works (for anyone who may be interested in the solution).

Yes, I'm aware at first sight, for non Golang users, it may look a not-so-friendly syntax, but Go templates are just too powerful to not use them :D

This looks fun, but how does this differentiate it's self from https://pushover.net/ ?

Answer from another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017 reply

I've been forever looking for something that can do this in WhatsApp because that's the only app that in my whitelist (android). How much battery does your app consume?

I'm a total miser when it comes to my phone battery and while I surely don't fully understand how android push messages work, I am just paranoid of letting more apps run in the background (like fb messenger, truecaller, etc) because they definitely reduce the battery life.

There are no processes running in the background in this app (apart from a periodic check every 10 minutes for new notifications, which lasts very few seconds). I use it all day long and never have issues with battery, because the CPU is used only when it receives a new notification.

With Telegram this is pretty simple: "https://api.telegram.org/bot#{token}/sendMessage?chat_id=#{c...

All you'd need to do to set it up is create a bot (from within Telegram via the BotFather account), and then either start a conversation with it or add it to a group chat or channel.

I've been using this approach to send me notifications whenever someone logs in to one of my servers for a bit of extra security.

Done that too :)

But then, when you need templates, and send payloads from webhooks, there it gets messy..

I made Notify17 exactly to avoid that mess :D

I'd be interested, this sounds like a nice way to receive periodic data from my home server (like successful cronjobs, smart warnings, but also from hass.io, like: Home temperature is outside of normal parameters etc). I subscribed to the mailing list (I'm on Android). Does this rely on Google Play services?

Hi, yes it will in first place rely on FCM. I already thought to have a second variant which would be independent. If you're interested, let me know :)

I'd be, and perhaps devs that target free Android (AOSP) (no play services).

Yes, I understand the point there :) I will add it to the list of features, because I can see a biiig market there :D

Neat, congrats. I'm currently using Zulip and custom integrations (which were very easy to do) to do more or less the same thing. So, not sure there's a reason for me to switch now. But I might have used this if it had been available back then. Might steal some of your ideas though ;-)

Thanks a lot! Hope you can find even more useful features in Notify17! ;)

I already use KDEconnect for this. fully encrypted and even local net only if you so wish. (and not limited to kde)

Yeah, KDEConnect is nice too :)

Notify17 is more of a SaaS for who desires an immediately ready system to generate notifications.

Congratulations on the launch. It looks great and I wish you success on this project

Could you kindly answer this question for me. How does your product compare to pushover.net? Are the problems to be solved the same? What are the tradeoffs?

Thanks

Compared to pushover, Notify17 is conceptually easier to set up and first-use (meaning, you create an account and you can already test notifications). I didn't like the not-so-immediate concept of pushover.

I belive Notify17's UI is friendlier for users, less cluttered. Clearly Notify17 has less features overall (for the moment), because it focuses on few core concepts, which are simple notifications ( https://notify17.net/docs/api-endpoints/#raw-notifications ) and notification templates ( https://notify17.net/docs/templates/ ).

The two products have two distinct philosophies. At the time I evaluated pushover, I thought it was too enterprisey, not suitable for simple daily usage. Therefore, I tried to create a friendlier service :)

The tradeoff, for the moment, is probably less features overall (you can see a list of features here: https://notify17.net/docs/features/ ). The benefit is that you have a UI that lets you manage your content (in my opinion clearly) way far more easily than with pushover.

Looks neat, congratulations on the launch! As someone who is currently building his own thing, I have the utmost respect for everyone who carries their product through the finish line. I wish you all the best.

Thank you a lot, it has been a long journey, and seeing your own product coming out it's and indescribable feeling XP

Best of luck to you too!!! If you want to keep in touch, feel free to mail me at alberto@notify17.net :)

Well done on shipping, great achievement.

I'm getting this error on the new encryption password screen: Repeated encryption password does not match!

even though I am copy/pasting this random password ccU2zrQ0MLoE7dLYCmvSBZwtt4jgcw

How long before the android client?

Thanks,

Joe

Hi!

You're not the only one reporting this error, I'll look into it as soon as possible :)

Android client is in active development, but I'm afraid I cannot exactly predict when it will be ready. I prefer to not give in this context an esteem which could be wrong, sorry for this. :)

P.s. thanks a lot!

I’ve thought about doing this exact thing. I wish you the best of luck - I think there is a strong demand for a simple solution like this.

Thanks a lot for the wish! I hope many will find this tool useful :)

Congrats and kudos on the nice website (how long did the website take?). Also, did you use golang for the product?

Thanks a lot!!!

Actually, for the website I relied heavily on antd ( https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/ ) for the design. I cannot really say how long it took because it's always been developed alongise the backend.

Aaaand yes, I LOVE golang, even more after creating Notify17 using it. The clarity of that language is impressive.

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