Courier

How Product Teams Build, Test and Ship Multichannel Notifications in Design Studio

Product teams need to build, test, and ship notifications across multiple channels without filing an engineering ticket every time. Courier's Design Studio is the workspace for that: a template builder, visual channel routing, omnichannel testing, and publishing in one place. This post walks through the traditional template designer paradigm, how it splits effort across too many tools, and outlines a path for product and growth teams to ship transactional, product, and marketing notifications from a single workspace.

EU Data Residency for Notifications: What Engineering Teams Need to Know

Courier supports EU data residency through a dedicated datacenter in AWS EU-West-1 (Ireland), with full API feature parity, same-workspace dual-region access, built-in GDPR deletion endpoints, and localization support for multilingual notifications. Engineering teams can switch to EU hosting by changing a single base URL with no workspace migration or downtime required.

Customer Engagement Platforms Are Splintered. Message Orchestration Is the Fix

Customer engagement platforms are splintered. Some are built for campaigns, others for support automation, and others treat messaging as a transactional delivery problem. The result is collisions, blind spots, and message fatigue. The highest-leverage fix is solving the lifecycle-to-product and transactional vector with a message orchestration layer: one system that routes, suppresses, prioritizes, and observes messages across channels. Think air traffic control for user communications.

Top 8 Customer Engagement Platforms for Product-Led SaaS in 2026

Comparing Courier, Iterable, OneSignal, Braze, Customer.io, Knock, Novu, and SuprSend across orchestration, developer experience, and infrastructure primitives for product-led SaaS.

What are transactional notifications? Transactional email examples, transactional push, and more.

Transactional notifications are automated messages triggered by user actions or system events, like password resets, order confirmations, and payment alerts. Unlike marketing messages, they require no opt-in and have legal protections under CAN-SPAM. This guide covers what transactional notifications are, how they work across email, SMS, and push channels, real-world examples for each, and how to stay compliant. Whether you're building your first notification system or auditing an existing one, this breakdown will help you understand what belongs in each category and how to route messages correctly.

The $5.9 Billion Rebuild: Why Healthcare Is Replacing Its Notification Infrastructure

The clinical alert and notification market will reach $5.9 billion by 2032, growing at 12.3% annually. That number represents hardware, software, and services combined. It also represents healthcare's admission that pagers and overhead speakers aren't enough anymore. Healthcare organizations are rebuilding how critical information moves through their systems. Regulatory pressure, workforce shortages, and value-based care economics are forcing the investment. The software layer is where outcomes are won or lost.

Vibe Coding Notifications: How to Use Courier with Cursor or Claude Code

Courier's MCP server lets AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code interact directly with your notification infrastructure. Unlike Knock and Novu's MCP servers that focus on API operations, Courier's includes embedded installation guides for Node, Python, Flutter, React, and other platforms. When you prompt "add Courier to my app," your AI assistant pulls accurate setup instructions rather than relying on outdated training data. OneSignal's MCP is community-maintained, not official. Courier supports 50+ providers, native Slack/Teams integration, drop-in inbox and preference components, and a free tier of 10,000 notifications/month. Configure in Cursor with "url": "https://mcp.courier.com" and "headers": { "api_key": "YOUR_KEY" }.

The Complete Guide to B2B Customer Engagement

Courier provides the notification infrastructure layer for B2B customer engagement, routing messages across email, SMS, push, in-app, Slack, and Teams based on user preferences and product events. Unlike building notification systems in-house—which takes months of engineering time for features like multi-channel routing, preference management, and delivery tracking—Courier handles this infrastructure so product teams can focus on engagement strategy. B2B customer engagement requires multiple layers: notification infrastructure (Courier), customer data platforms (Segment), product analytics (Mixpanel/Amplitude), and channel-specific tools. Companies with strong engagement programs see 15-25% churn reduction. The key is connecting product events to customer communication at the right moment through the right channel, handling complexity like multiple users per account with different notification needs across work channels.

Customer Engagement Platform vs CRM: Key Differences Explained

A CRM stores customer data: contacts, purchases, support tickets, and pipeline. It answers "who are our customers?" A customer engagement platform (CEP) orchestrates communication across email, push, SMS, in-app, and chat. It answers "what should we tell them next?" CRMs focus on historical records. CEPs process real-time behavior and trigger messages based on actions. Most teams need both, plus a third layer: notification infrastructure for reliable multi-channel delivery. Courier bridges CEP and infrastructure by combining routing, failover, and delivery tracking with engagement features like preference management, visual templates, and in-app notification centers.

How We Investigate Support Tickets at Courier

Courier's support team resolves complex issues 4X faster using parallel investigation. Here's how it works: when a ticket comes in, an AI agent starts exploring the codebase while the support engineer examines actual customer data. The agent traces code paths and searches past investigations. The human reads event logs and forms hypotheses based on real state. Running both simultaneously catches mismatches fast—the agent sees what could cause a problem, the human sees what actually happened. This post breaks down the workflow, tools, and documentation structure that makes it repeatable.

Top 20 Notification Examples That Actually Drive Engagement

Explore 20 stellar notification examples from industry leaders like Rippling, Slack, FedEx, Crocs, Miro, Trustpilot, OpenTable, and BambooHR that actually drive engagement. From payday celebrations to healthcare reminders, these patterns showcase what makes notifications effective across email, SMS, push, and in-app channels. Courier's enterprise platform enables intelligent routing, multi-channel orchestration, and universal inbox integration to implement these proven patterns at scale.

Video Guide: Courier MCP + AI Coding (Cursor)

Building notifications into your app just got dramatically easier. Courier's new MCP server brings AI-powered notification assistance directly to your IDE, so you can integrate, test, and manage notifications without ever leaving your workspace. Model Context Protocol servers give AI agents deterministic functionality instead of guessing. Connect your AI assistant directly to Courier's platform, get smart installation guidance, send messages with natural language, and manage users safely—all through Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code, and more.

Checklist for Building a Better In-App Notification Center (And How Courier Checks Every Box)

Building a modern notification center requires real-time updates, cross-platform sync, and multi-channel orchestration. Companies like Twilio chose Courier instead of building in-house. This complete checklist covers 7 essential requirements: WebSocket delivery, state sync between web and mobile, email/SMS/push orchestration, audit logging, native SDKs, preference management, and automatic failover. Learn how to implement everything in under an hour vs 6 months of custom development.

Why You Need Multi-Tenant Infrastructure for Notifications

Need to send notifications for many customers without mixing data or losing brand identity? This practical guide walks you through mapping a tenant hierarchy, carrying context in every call, setting up layered preferences, and adding dynamic branding. It pairs code samples with checklists so you can choose to build from scratch or plug in Courier when you are ready to scale

Tools and Techniques to Establish Your Data Team Early

How tools like Segment, Metabase, Snowflake, Census, and others, can help establish a data team from the very early stages in a startup.

Develop a Motivational QOTD with Courier and GPT2

Courier and OpenGPT2 in action: build a service that sends friends and family an AI generated motivational quote of the day.

Decode: Live Workshops to Build Exceptional Notification Experiences

Live coding workshops to build exceptional notification experiences for developers.

How to Send Invoice and Add Payment Reminder in Next.js with Courier API

Learn how to build an invoice management system with Next.js and Courier.

How We Attract Top Talent at Courier

How do you fairly compensate your employees for a job well done? It’s a question that often gets ignored in favor of the bottom line and one that not enough companies talk about.

Common Courier Troubleshooting Solutions for Developers

In this post, we will discuss example issues around Courier’s Gmail integration and API rate limits, an incomplete data profile, and an incomplete request with Inbox and Toast, and how to fix them.

How We Became HIPAA Compliant

Today, we are excited to announce that Courier is now HIPAA compliant and this post will get into why SaaS companies should be HIPAA compliant, why this is important for our company, and the steps we took to get here.

Courier Raised a $35M Series B to Make Notifications Delightful

We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $35M to provide engineering teams with fantastic notification infrastructure! The round was led by GV with participation from our existing investors at Bessemer Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

Announcing Courier Automations: Application Logic for Notifications

We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature for the Courier platform: Courier Automations. Courier Automations is a toolset that includes both an API and a visual builder that allows anyone to easily configure logic for notification workflows.

How We Built Our Documentation On Docusaurus

To cover our bases, we needed to improve and expand our documentation and this time, we wanted to make it scalable and with a focus on a great user experience. We decided to use Docusaurus to do so.

How I Used Raspberry Pi to Detect Water Leaks in My Home

I decided to invest in the appropriate hardware and make use of my own software development skills to make sure that I would get a notification any time there was even a small leak in my home.

How Courier Became SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant

This post is about what it means to be SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, why it is important that Courier now is, and what our journey looked like on our way here.

Organizing In-app Communication With Inbox Feed

Inbox Feed is an in-app repository of the notification history so that users don’t miss out on any important information. In a notifications inbox, users can view all their notifications in one place.

Introducing Courier Elemental

With Courier Elemental, you can customize the look, language, and structure of your notification based on locale, channel, and other more advanced custom logic.

How We Use Internal Hackathons to Create New Product Features

By organizing internal hackathons in your company, your employees can challenge and compete to solve internal or customer problems—which can lead to real-life features in your product.

Courier + Segment Integration: Product Notifications In Minutes

We are excited to announce that Courier now integrates easily with Segment, the leading customer data platform! After 2.5 years and hundreds of customers, our community has convinced us that having additional event sources to act as notification triggers would help expand use cases and reduce the effort required to get up and running with Courier.

Why Remote Work is Not Here to Stay at Courier

We all spent a year getting used to remote work; now, the big question is how do we transition back to the in-person work pattern in a new world with Covid-19?

Introducing React Toast and Inbox for Notifications That Don’t Suck

With Courier Toast and Inbox, developers can support custom notifications for their users’ specificities and communicate through multiple wide-ranging channels while maintaining a single in-app notifications repository.

The Notifications Strategy that Put Us in the Product Hunt Newsletter

We were able to execute a strategy that helped us rank #5 on launch day and were featured in the Product Hunt newsletter the next day. Here is how we did it.

From MVP to Production Ready With Serverless

In this post, we explore how we use Serverless at Courier, review some Serverless basics, and explore how Serverless has empowered our team to accomplish more with less.

Courier April Product Release Updates: In-app Inbox, Preferences, and Automations

In this update, Aydrian and Nate (Head of Customer Success) as cohosts cover what is new with the in-app notifications API, our new preferences component, and our automations API, which is now GA.

Content, Notifications, and IoT

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.

Notify Discourse users about your livestream with Twitch EventSub and Courier

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.

Building the Ultimate Notifications Stack with Twilio, Segment, and Courier

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.

Building a No-Code Secret Santa App using Courier, Typeform, and Integromat

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.

How to White Label Email Notifications for Multiple Brands

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

Supercharging Webhooks

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.

Trick-or-Treating From a Distance Using Slack

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.

Why We Are Moving off REST and Implementing GraphQL

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.

Sending Interactive Emails Built With Parcel

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

Exploring the Brand New Courier Lists API Using Postman

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.

Sending Notifications via Microsoft Teams

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.

Introducing the Lists API: Notify Lists of Users With One API Call

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

Building a Low Code Conference Application with Twilio and Typeform

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.

First Look at Notifying Multiple Recipients using Lists

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.

Sending Notifications via Slack

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.

Announcing Courier's $10M Series A

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.

Controlling IoT using the Webhook Provider

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.

Designing Slack Notifications using Block Kit and Jsonnet

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.

Getting the Most out of Courier Logs

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.

Onboarding as a Software Engineer During Lockdown Due to Covid-19

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

No Code Notifications powered by Segment

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.

Supporting Idempotent Requests with the Courier Node.js SDK

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.

Branding and white-labeling email notifications

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.

Live streaming with the Courier Community

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.

Why We Built Courier

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.