Show HN: I made an API to easily send custom notifications to your phone

[Sorasful]

https://pushbeacon.com/

Hey HN!

I’m a solopreneur, and in the last few years, I've built several projects. However, each time these projects took too long, so I decided to try shorter projects and avoid spending months on projects that won’t attract anyone.

When you have one project, it’s pretty easy to manage; you have your dashboard, you check your mail… But when you start having multiple projects, it becomes more complicated.

For example, I wanted to know when I received a payment from LemonSqueezy, and since they don’t have a mobile app, the only way was to constantly check my emails to see if something happened.

That’s why I created this project. Now, in my projects, I send notifications to my phone whenever a user signs up for my app or when I receive a payment on my webhook from LemonSqueezy.

There are, of course, alternatives to this project; I didn't invent anything. But I focused on allowing people to set up their notifications very quickly and keeping things simple. We don’t provide 100 integrations, we don’t have a history… But we do one simple thing, and that’s well enough for a majority of use cases.

Sidenote: PushBeacon uses PushBeacon to warn me when something happens, and I find it very satisfying.

Would love your feedback on this !

Téva.

[linsomniac]

I've been using, passingly, ntfy.sh, can you compare PushBeacon to ntfy?

I like the idea of a pay once, PushBeacon does definitely have attractive pricing. Though, my usage of ntfy.sh is so minimal that I easily fit into their free tier (so far I've not gotten above a couple notifications a month). Their API is also super duper easy.

[Sorasful → linsomniac]

Certainly! Fundamentally, ntfy.sh and pushbeacon.com do the same thing. However, there are a few differences:

- as you mentioned, the pricing: we offer lifetime pricing, which will evolve. The current price is for the early stages because the project is still in its initial phase.

- regarding notifications, we don't store anything at all, unlike ntfy. This can be a strength or a weakness; if you need to have many different channels and keep track of them, ntfy is clearly a better alternative.

- PushBeacon was designed to be very simple to use. Generate a code, enter it into the application, add an API key, and that’s it. You can send notifications in less than two minutes.

We don't offer as many features as ntfy, but simplicity is the heart of the project.

[breckenedge]

I saw your product and immediately thought “oh good an alternative to WebPush!” but I guess this really only works for pushing notifications to yourself?

[Sorasful → breckenedge]

You can decide to send push notifications to yourself, but you can also give code to others people so they can also receive the alerts !

It can be good if for example you have a project with co-founders and you need everyone to know what's happening, or other uses cases.