Hey everyone, not sure if this is okay to put here, feel free to remove if not. I’ve gotten a lot from this community, so I’d really value any feedback anyone has. I’ve been working on a project in my spare time (with Prisma 😉 ), it’s a dead simple API that lets you shoot out email, slack, and text message alerts to your team when important things happen in your software. Would really, really appreciate any feedback on why you think this would or wouldn’t be useful, before I invest any more time into it than I already have 😅 https://devalerts.io

I wouldn’t talk about pricing until you have the service up and tested. Especially when you are looking to receive feedback. Right now it feels scammy, and I don’t think that is the vibe that you want. The interface is convoluted. Why do I need to convert the options to a string? Rather than

send('email: dev-team, slack: #general, sms: jen', msg)

Why not go for this?

const message = 'We have a new user in our app, reach out!'
send({
  message,
  transports: [
    { email: 'dev-team' },
    { email: 'support' },
    { slack: '#general' },
    { slack: '#support' },
    { sms: 'sam' }.
    { sms: 'jen' },
  ],
})

You could do them as an object instead of the transports array, but then you wouldn’t be able to send different arguments to them. You also wouldn’t be able to send to multiple endpoints (channels, email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) Now as for the value… I’m sorry, but it isn’t likely going to be useful over a battle-tested open-source alternative with Logstash. Alternatively, developers will likely opt to use the Slack SDK, email module, or Twillio as needed. If you had included a link to the source code, I could have taken a look at it to be more specific. I want to be clear. I don’t think that this is a bad project. It has a lot of juicy integrations, and there is a ton of learning value there. If your goal is to get more experience with this type of thing, KEEP GOING! You’ll learn a lot! Just don’t expect this to be a revenue stream. There just isn’t enough value over alternatives that have been around are completely free. I hope that is helpful. Good luck!

Thanks for taking the time to look and for the feedback @Jason Kleinberg! You’re right that the interface I went with is a weird way of doing things. My goal and my target audience was people who wanted to get something out the door quickly, something that read like plain english that you could grok in like 30 seconds. I do think I will need to provide an interface like what you described if I ever want to let people do anything more powerful, like append arbitrary data to their requests. Users could def solve this problem by integrating with the Slack api, Twilio, and an email provider. The goal with this was to make it so much more simple than those that it would be worth it as a time saver, since you get all 3 out of the box. Are there any other integrations you think that would make this more valuable? Like a Github integration where you could create new issues with your requests? Any apis you’ve used in the past that were annoying to integrate with that could make sense with something like this? I’ll take a look into Logstash, I hadn’t come across that before. Thanks again for the feedback!! -Joe