Simon B. StøvringYesterday evening I threw together a landing page for a side project to my other side projects:
It’s a tiny and opinionated tool for sending push notifications. No sign up. No message history. No dashboard.
I like it. Would you? 😄
brrr’s onboarding flow is virtually nonexistent because I don’t think it needs to be any more complicated than this.
brrr is so simple. Its killer feature is everything that’s not there.
If I am to release brrr, then I’ll need to come up with a pricing strategy. Even if it’s a simple app, I’ll need to ensure that I cover my costs and ideally earn just a little. Choosing a strategy is difficult, though.
Current ideas include:
- First N pushes are free, then $X for 1,000 pushes.
- First month is free, then $X/year.
- One device is free. $X/year for multiple devices.
A tip jar and one-time purchase seem risky for an app with hosting costs.
Honestly, I'm leaning towards the first month being free and then charging something like $6.99/year. No monthly option. It’s a pricing model that’s as simple as the app, and a price point where I think most people who’d use it won’t mind too much. Or so I hope.
A colleague convinced me that I needed to add an additional feature to brrr. Tapping a notification should show it in the app to prevent accidental taps and missing the notification.
When people try to send pushes without an active subscription, I could just return an error, but I feel like I should also do something more fun.
Like, I could send a push saying people need to start a subscription or scramble the text in the notification.
But I fear that any such notification might be sufficient for some users to deduce why they would have otherwise received the notification 😄
Maybe I should take a page out of Festivitas’ book and have people name a fair price, but this time use it for a subscription instead of a one-time IAP 🤔
Do you want to help me test brrr? 👇
https://testflight.apple.com/join/55qZ7dRn
Learn more about the project on https://brrr.now
maique 
Rob
@rob Huh, interesting! I haven’t seen that. Can you share your request with me (without the secret in the URL!)
@simonbs Might be a HTTPBot (cURL import) issue; when manually entering raw JSON in the body the notification displays correct (spaces instead of escape codes).
Will check with Proxyman later today and report back.
Michael Brown@simonbs the loading spinner on the “Welcome to brrr” screen took around 20s or more before seeing the example `curl`. Is that normal? I thought something was broken….
@mluisbrown There’s room for optimizations in that flow. Most of them will come from upgrading the plan on my hosting provider, I think.
Himalaya
Michael Lysons@simonbs Works great on my phone using Shortcuts.
@Himalaya None, really, but Apple enforces a 4 KB limitation on the entire payload. brrr uses a tiny bit and then the rest can be distributed across your title, subtitle, and message.
I can’t believe its not @twcau@simonbs Happy to. Will give it a bash with some Uptime Kuma status messages via webhooks for starters.
@simonbs But first... command line:
PS C:\Users\pc> curl -X POST https://api.brrr.now/v1/br_usr_<redacted> \ -d 'Hello world!'
{"success":true}curl: (3) URL rejected: Bad hostname
PS C:\Users\pc>
Message was delivered successfully to target device (testing from Australia, executed from a Win11 device running a PowerShell terminal).
Possibly my network or firewall causing that URL rejected message in the curl response - will need to look when I have some time.
@twcau Hmm. Haven’t seen that before 🤔
@simonbs Also, interesting item when adding the Webhook to Uptime Kuma, and sending a test message from it (see screenshot below).
Again, not sure if you, or me and my firewall/adblocking services causing it without further investigation.
My Uptime Kuma instance is running as a Home Assistant app (some kind of quasi-Docker container I think). At some point, will migrate it to a standalone Docker container.
@twcau Hmm.. I wonder why it would disallow that certificate.
@simonbs Just confirmed - It tripped a Firewall rule at my end. Cloudflare has the domain classified as Parked domain (which I block), and the rule triggers line up with my test times.
I’ve just submitted a request to CF to have the parked classification removed, and switched to API.
@twcau Interesting! Thanks a lot for looking into this! I've no clue why Cloudflare would register it as parked. I even use them as DNS.
@simonbs Getting back to core, happy to report that I can't find any issues so far. Tested the core JSON body options.
Only possible thing I could find is how line breaks behave in the messages. I found that if I wanted part of the text in message: to appear on a new line, I needed to use \r\n, and not just \n alone.
Also no issue found using any combination of JSON fields regardless of order.
@twcau Thanks for testing so thoroughly! I’ll make sure that \n works.
@simonbs As for the parked domain question, the Domain intel tab that I have access to via my CF account doesn't give any clear indication as to when that was added and/or its change history.
Christian Tietze
Stephen Kelley@simonbs send a notification every minute for an hour telling them they need to upgrade to get it to stop.
Nils@simonbs For a potential free tier you could just let it say something like „New message. Click to show its content“ and then in app show the full message + an upgrade text + button. If the free tier limit is reached I would throw an error
@nmann That is exactly why I think it’s a good idea to send a notification even when the user isn’t subscribed: it’s a chance to get them onto a subscription.
Sami Samhuri@simonbs Only send it once every few times it’s supposed to go out so they can’t rely on it.
Billy Adams@simonbs Just out of curiosity, how would the web-hook be invoked/triggered here?
@billyadams For the agent to send a notification? I’m actually not sure. My colleague uses it like this but I don’t know how he set it up. I suppose it could just be part of AGENTS.md that it should make a curl command once it’s done with specific tasks.
toto
Colin@hoagie Yes, that’s an option too. I just fear it’s hard to structure in a way that’ll get enough people to pay. I mean, if people don’t put much load, I won’t have high costs, but I think people still need to pay a bit for the occasional push.
Brendan Thompson@BrendanThompson @hoagie No, it’s written in TypeScript. I really like working in that language.
Amy Worrall@simonbs I don't have a use for this right now, but I’d _like_ to have one!
For me I'd rather $X for N pushes. I assume you'd offer options of auto top-up or manual?
One device being free sounds dangerous, some people might be happy with that and end up costing you a bunch. (And also you could just open 5 free accounts for your 5 devices -- anything that can send one HTTP call can send five!)
@amyworrall Indeed. I’m not too happy allowing a single device for free either.
As for the automatic top pup, that’s why I don’t like that option either. It gets complicated.
Kevin C@simonbs Maybe:
First N pushes are free, then tiered subscriptions based on usage level:
- $X/period for 1000 pushes per period
- $Y/period for 10000 pushes per period
- $Z/period for unlimited pushes
Maybe too complicated.
But most people hopefully understand subscriptions that also include actual server costs.
@somelinguist That could work. I’m just hoping for a pricing model that’s as simple as the app, so I’d prefer not to have tiers 😄
@simonbs any way I can get an invite?
Michael Sliwinski@simonbs Where’s the TestFlight link? 🤪
clokey74@simonbs App review machine go burrrr…