
Show HN: Made a new notification tool and I'm looking for some beta testers - cmaster11
https://notify17.net
======
cmaster11
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](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](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

~~~
geocrasher
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.

~~~
cuu508
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.

------
blader_johny
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[https://reactjs.org/docs/error-
decoder.html?invariant=185](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...](https://dash.notify17.net/async.vendors~main.edfeb73f1ceaca53f59d.js:113:18444))

~~~
cmaster11
Hi! Thanks for the notice, is this error still happening?

------
nexuist
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.

~~~
cmaster11
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.

~~~
panarky
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://aws.amazon.com/sns/pricing/)

[https://www.twilio.com/notify/pricing](https://www.twilio.com/notify/pricing)

~~~
cmaster11
Hi, I'll copy the same answer from a previous post (
[https://new.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bmujjg/made_a_new_n...](https://new.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bmujjg/made_a_new_notification_tool_and_im_looking_for/)
):

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.

------
cdmp
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.

~~~
cmaster11
Weeeell, it's in the planssss :D :D :D Happy to let you know, when it will
happen in the future!

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

~~~
cmaster11
Eheh well, self-promotion is kinda vital for who makes his own product! ;)

Question, how was using Scala on Android? :O

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

~~~
cmaster11
I am finding out more and more they're not competing products:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017)

~~~
nurettin
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?

~~~
cmaster11
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.

------
cyberferret
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.

~~~
cmaster11
Cool!!

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

~~~
cyberferret
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).

~~~
cmaster11
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

------
KaiserPro
This looks fun, but how does this differentiate it's self from
[https://pushover.net/](https://pushover.net/) ?

~~~
cmaster11
Answer from another comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937017)
reply

:)

------
superasn
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.

~~~
mercer
With Telegram this is pretty simple:
"[https://api.telegram.org/bot#{token}/sendMessage?chat_id=#{c...](https://api.telegram.org/bot#{token}/sendMessage?chat_id=#{chat_id}&text=#{message}")

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.

~~~
cmaster11
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

------
teekert
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?

~~~
cmaster11
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 :)

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

~~~
cmaster11
Yes, I understand the point there :) I will add it to the list of features,
because I can see a biiig market there :D

------
_frkl
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 ;-)

~~~
cmaster11
Thanks a lot! Hope you can find even more useful features in Notify17! ;)

------
gcb0
I already use KDEconnect for this. fully encrypted and even local net only if
you so wish. (and not limited to kde)

~~~
cmaster11
Yeah, KDEConnect is nice too :)

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

------
reqres
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

~~~
cmaster11
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](https://notify17.net/docs/api-endpoints/#raw-notifications) )
and notification templates (
[https://notify17.net/docs/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/](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.

------
nerdbeere
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.

~~~
cmaster11
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 :)

------
mywacaday
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

~~~
cmaster11
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!

------
sjroot
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.

~~~
cmaster11
Thanks a lot for the wish! I hope many will find this tool useful :)

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

~~~
cmaster11
Thanks a lot!!!

Actually, for the website I relied heavily on antd ( [https://github.com/ant-
design/ant-design/](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.

