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When Courier’s AWS billings suddenly increased, CTO Seth Carney discovered that data insights tool Datadog was causing costs to skyrocket and set out to fix it.

Push notifications are generally an effective mechanism for user engagement, but it's no longer enough to simple just *have* push notifications. Given increased user scrutiny and competitiveness for attention, notification system design is more important than over. We offer some guidelines on how to design effective push notifications.

Transactional emails have higher engagement rates than traditional marketing emails and most recipients find them to be the most valuable type of message in their inbox. Here, we explore what makes a great transactional email and offer a few examples.

Building an email notification system is like an iceberg: It looks small and manageable, but there is a lot of nastiness hidden under the water. Thankfully, with the right approach and tools, it can be relatively painless to quickly create a scalable email notification service.

Creating the perfect notification strategy is like walking a tightrope of constantly changing do’s and don’ts. We've put together a guide to help walk through design considerations for scalable notification systems.

Looking to send push notifications for your application? We compare the top push notification APIs for developers to help you pick the right one.

Comparing the advantages and disadvantages of building your own notification system for transactional emails vs. buying a product.

Learn how to send an email in your Python application with SMTP, with a transactional email API, and with a multi-channel notification service.

Each month we share the latest Courier news and highlight what we shipped, wrote, and shared with our community. With February come and gone, we're back with our second monthly wrap-up of 2021.

Learn how to send an email in your Node.js application with Nodemailer and SMTP, with a transactional email API, and with a multi-channel notification service.

On February 2nd and 3rd, Shy Ruparel joined Aydrian for another Courier and Contentful crossover stream. This time, they decided to play around with an IoT E-ink display and use it to show the latest posts from Contentful and send notifications using Courier.

Looking to send transactional emails for your application? We compare the top transactional email API services for developers to help you pick the right one.

In this tutorial, Aydrian will show you how to extend the Node.js and Express app from part two to send notifications to more than one destination using Courier’s Lists API. He'll also demo sending to a Discord channel.

Today Slack commands the attention of more than 12 million daily active users. We sat down with former product lead Liza Gurtin to dive into the messaging giant's notifications strategy – and the flowchart that got everyone on Twitter talking.

In this tutorial, Aydrian will show you how to listen for events from Twitch and then create and trigger a notification in Courier. He’ll demo sending an SMS notification with Twilio.

We’re excited to announce the release of Environments in Courier. You can now create, preview, and troubleshoot your notifications in a test environment before going live.

This series will show you how to use Twitch EventSub and Courier to automatically send notifications to many destinations – Discord, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and more – when your Twitch stream goes live.

Software Engineer Chris Gradwohl details some tips and tricks around setting up a new Apple M1 machine for development.

On January 6, Riley Napier joined me for our first Courier Live of the new year. They walk through triggering a Courier notification that updates a banner on Discourse when a Twitch stream goes live using EventSub webhooks.

Together Courier, Segment, and Twilio make it possible to reach users across every communication channel without the monumental work of building your own notifications infrastructure. The result: a more powerful way to drive meaningful user engagement.

For the Courier Live on December 2nd, I teamed up with Nicolas Grenié, Developer Advocate at Typeform, to have some more #NoCode fun. This time, we learned how to use Courier and Typeform with Integromat, a no-code automation platform.

If you've ever had to whitelabel emails manually, you know how much of a headache that can be. Here's how you can Brands in Courier to quickly and easily whitelabel emails to match your customers' brands or your own sub-brands.

Today Twilio powers billions of interactions across voice, text, chat, and more. We sat down with Patrick Malatack, former VP of Product, to discuss Twilio's journey from a single voice API to the leading multi-channel communications platform.

For the week of November 9th, we did something a little different. I teamed up with Shyamal Ruparel, Developer Evangelist at Contentful to build an application that used Courier and Contentful during our respective live streams. We started on the ContentfulDevs stream on November 10th and finished the next day on the Courier Live stream.

In this tutorial, you'll get a step-by-step walkthrough of how to add attachments to your transactional emails using Amazon SES and S3. We'll also show you how to integrate your email provider with Courier to manage your email templates and delivery.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you an easy way to add email functionality to your Ruby app. You’ll learn how to set up your email service, design your email template, and test and preview your email before publishing it to production. You’ll also find sample code you can use to quickly start sending in your Ruby program.

For our Pre-Halloween October 28th Courier Live, Nate Munger returned to help me come up with a socially distanced way to handle Trick-or-Treaters using Courier.

We’re excited to be moving Courier’s internal infrastructure and eventually our customer-facing APIs to GraphQL. In this blog post I’ll talk about why we’ve decided to make the change from REST and what our plans are for the rollout.

Bluecrew’s Chief Product Officer shares why the W-2 staffing platform chose Courier to scale their notifications infrastructure. See how they engage thousands of hourly workers and employers with multi-channel notifications.

We’re excited to announce the Courier destination for Segment is publicly available. Product teams can now send targeted notifications to users on any channel – without shipping any code. 

For our October 21st Courier Live, Avi Goldman joined me to talk about building Interactive Emails using Parcel.

In this white paper, we share the strategies we have discovered through our work in building direct integrations and explain how to add SMS with Twilio to an existing SendGrid integration. We'll help you think through the various questions involved and set up your infrastructure.

One of the most exciting internal events at Courier is our internal hackathon, named “Dispatch”. As we gear up to host our second hackathon next week, I wanted to share a quick recap of how our first Dispatch went earlier this year and why I think more companies should consider hosting internal events in this format.

For our October 14th Courier Live, Arlemi Turpault joined me to talk about using the Courier API with Postman. Postman is a collaborative platform for API development. Together we walked through our existing Courier Collection on the Postman API Network. We then explored updating and using it with our new Lists API.

Tony Nguyen from our engineering team returned to help me send my first notification using Microsoft Teams during our October 7th Courier Live. Together we navigated spinning up a bot application in Microsoft Azure and connected it to the Microsoft Teams integration in Courier. After updating an existing notification to include a Microsoft Teams channel, we attempted to send the notification to a channel and as a proactive message to a user.

Courier’s Lists API lets you create lists, subscribe recipient profiles, then notify every user on the list with a single Send API call.

Since our September 30th Courier Live happened during the Twilio SIGNAL conference, we did a special stream to highlight using Twilio SMS and SendGrid. Twilio Developer Evangelist Lizzie Siegle joined me for a deep dive of the low code conference application we created for SIGNAL using Typeform, Twilio, SendGrid, Glitch, and Courier.

Recently, we’ve been working on standardizing some aspects of Courier’s REST APIs, such as naming conventions and HTTP status response codes. I thought I’d share some of our guiding principles and learnings that might be useful for your team as well.

For our September 23 Courier Live, Danny Douglass from our engineering team returned to give us an API first look at our new lists feature. Lists allow you to send the same notification to multiple recipients using a single API call. Using our Courier Live Alert example, we walked through creating lists, subscribing existing and new recipients to it, and sending the notification using the new Send List endpoint.

For our September 16th Courier Live, Paul Chin, Jr joined me to talk about Begin. Begin helps you effortlessly ship web apps and APIs on AWS. Paul recently updated his 5 year old LAMP stack Ghostbusters site into a functional FASTstack application using Begin. Together we walked through creating a new Begin application that included an HTML contact form and configured it to send using Courier.

I wanted to share how statuses work today in Courier and some of the things we thought through while building a single source of truth across integration providers. I’ll also explain how we provide open tracking for emails and click-through tracking across all channels.

As a follow up to the Courier Live where Troy and I built the Pigeon Weather App, I went back and added support for sending the notification as a direct message in Slack. Adding this additional channel only required adding the Slack provider, designing the message, and updating our Glitch App to accept Slack profile information.

We're excited to announce that Courier has raised a $10.1M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Matrix Partners, Twilio, Slack, Y Combinator, and many great angel investors. This follows a previously unannounced $2.3M seed round that we raised last summer.

Riley Napier from our engineering team returned for our September 2nd Courier Live. Together we used the Courier Webhook Provider to send a notification using an unconventional channel, a BlinkStick Square.

Earlier this summer, Riley Napier from our engineering team joined me for our June 24th Courier Live to help me build a Slack Slash Command to display estimated departure times for BART Stations. We created a Glitch ExpressJS app to accept the commands and Courier to handle the responses. We designed the messages by dynamically generating Block Kit using Jsonnet.

As a former product manager, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed out of college, I remember clearly coming into the role with a set of rosy expectations that did not align at all with reality. I want to share my experience of what product was like for me, and a smattering of the various ironies that I experienced on the job.

During our August 19th Courier Live, Tony Nguyen from our engineering team joined me to talk about my favorite Courier feature, the logs. We presented a high level overview of the logs and dove into the details of each timeline event in the Courier Application. We then covered how you could retrieve the same information using the Messages API.

Tony's first week at Courier, which coincided with the first week of the Covid-19 lockdown in San Francisco.

Danny Douglass from our engineering team joined me for our August 12th Courier Live. We discussed a No Code approach to sending notifications using Courier as a Segment destination. It took less than 30 minutes from setup to sending our first notification.

Shadow DOM is an API for DOM encapsulation. It's perfect for when you need to embed a widget in a DOM you don't have access to.

During our August 5th Courier Live, I was joined by Riley Napier, one of our Sr. Software Engineers. Together we updated the Courier Node.js SDK to support our new Idempotent Requests feature.

Event-Driven Architecture: how it works, why we use it at Courier, and what our experience has been like so far.

During our July 29th Courier Live, I was joined by our Head of Customer Success, Nate Munger. Together we discussed our new Brands feature set and walked through using it to send an email.

Every Wednesday at noon Pacific, we'll be streaming Courier Live on our Twitch channel. Our first Courier Live, where we walked through adding email and text notifications to an existing application using Courier, is available on YouTube.

Observations from interviews with over 50 Fintech CTOs, VPEs, CPOs, and managers on notifications.

We built Courier to make sure nobody else ever has to spend millions on custom communication infrastructure, that our inboxes are never again flooded by a well-meaning developer who just didn’t have the time to implement user preferences or digests, and that simple tickets to tweak the text and branding of a template stop getting stuck just outside the scope of the next sprint.