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Comment by navneetloiwal | Hacker News Reader

Push notifications are a great way to consume time-sensitive information, like price/airfare, sports, stocks, app reviews, etc. Airgram makes it dead-simple to deliver these alerts without having to build your own app, so that you can focus on building interesting services.

Give it a spin! http://www.airgramapp.com

"I think notifications will become the primary way that we consume on the mobile device and may be the reason we move away from downloadable software and back to web based software on our mobile devices." - Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/mobile-notifications.html)

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Congrats on the app, it looks nice.

I launched Pushover (https://pushover.net/) this week, which looks to be pretty much the same exact product as yours: an HTTP API to push messages to an iOS and Android client.

I built it over the past 4 weeks to replace my use of Notifo, which shut down last year. There are a few other apps already available, like Prowl, Boxcar, and NotifyMyAndroid, but none were cross-platform, so I built Pushover.

I am charging for my app as a way to pay for the server costs, as I'm not sure how else these types of apps can make money and stay around. Notifo had a lot of users but their apps were free and I don't know if they even had any paying content providers pushing large amounts of messages. How do you plan to make money with yours?

So did Notifo actually shut down or not? I mean, it still works for me, and the web page is up. I offered many times to pay for the service.

It's still running, but I'm not working on it, so it's kind of in zombie mode. There are some plans afoot, but I can't talk about them yet... however, you should assume it will go away. I will try to give 30 days notice if/when the plug is ultimately pulled.

Thanks! It's refreshing to have such an open conversation and you deserve high praise for it. I can now look for an alternative.

As to Airgram, I'm worried because I don't see where they charge money. Pushover looks much more reasonable for me. I became wary of "free" — what "free" usually means is that eventually I am either a) bombarded with ads, b) the service disappears because there is no money or c) somebody acquires the startup because of their stellar subscriber growth (remember "free"?). In all cases I am left out and have to re-invest my time into looking for an alternative.

I also noticed over the years that the most stable and trouble-free services are those which I regularly pay for. I'm quite happy with SmugMug and Squarespace for example, even though there are free alternatives in each case.

Funny how this perspective is different from what you hear if you are a startup founder: as a founder, you are supposed to "build something people want", and the rest is supposed to sort itself out. But if you do build something people want, but never charge for it, you end up disappointing those people sooner or later...

jazzychad, thanks again for the frank statements and giving us the time to find another solution!

there, I like your design better, since I am comparing to Airgram right now: immediately I can see how it looks on the mobile device screen because you provide an image, AND I see the code in different languages, which is easy for my eyes to match to languages I am writing in. So, if I would need this kind of functionality today, I would go with yours.

Charging for the app will work for the DIY hacker types, but it'll be hard for other services to convince their users to purchase your app.

Neat app you have, there. We are not planning to charge for the apps, but keep a look out for premium features on Airgram.

Huh, very nice. I balked at the non-free app a bit, but hey, if it'll help keep the service alive, I'm all for it. I don't have a pressing need for it currently, but if it gets a bit more mature I will definitely buy the app and use it for the things I use Notifo for now.

Your app icon looks like Pinterest's, but otherwise it looks great, will be trying it out in a jiffy.

I was in the process of building essentially the same app as yours, for the same reasons :) After seeing yours (which I think looks great) I have dropped dev on mine (see: http://redd.it/r47p9) and will probably use your app to hook up some notifications to some other apps of mine.

Anyway good luck with pushover :)

Bug report: I created my own service (couldn't update the image because I can't be bothered to resize an image to 84x84 myself, can't you do that?), and subscribed myself to it. I then tested unsubscribing myself from within the app, but now it appears that I cannot re-subscribe myself (even though the API returns 'ok'). It looks like I can't create more than one service, so I've just screwed myself.

Also, please allow a way to delete notifications in the app. I guarantee you that will be one of the most requested features :)

Thanks for all the great feedback. We'll get right on it.

This what Notifo was trying to do but ran into quite a few challenges with adoption. You should talk with them more to see how you differentiate and solve the problem they had...

Yes, we are already talking to him to learn from his experience

I'm running it on my Android phone now. It works pretty well. I wish it uses Facebook/Google/etc. for user accounts though. The last thing I want to have to do is have another user/password. Also, what is the difference between this and Notifo (yc2010 I think)?

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