Journeys

A journey is a graph of nodes that runs once per user when triggered. You build it visually, publish it, and invoke it from your app or a Segment event. Courier runs the nodes in order, taking branches, waiting on delays, and sending messages until the run ends. A journey combines the other pieces: a trigger that starts it, that decide what happens between sends, and content written the way a is written. Each recipient is a whose profile the run reads once at invoke.

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Which one to use

Most notifications don’t need a journey, and the difference is whether the messaging spans steps and time. Use the when one call can say everything. Use a journey when the messaging unfolds over time, with branching, enrichment, or rate limiting between steps.

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How it works

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Trigger, then nodes

Every journey starts with a trigger that decides how users enter it:

• API: your code calls the invoke endpoint.
• Segment: Courier starts the journey when a matching event arrives.

Nodes then run in sequence: send, delay, branch, fetch (pull external data), throttle, batch, add-to-digest, and exit. A branch splits the flow into conditional paths. The run continues until every path reaches an end.

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A run works from a snapshot of its data

On invoke, Courier loads the recipient’s profile once and stores the run’s { data, profile } as a snapshot. Every node reads from that snapshot. Editing a user’s stored profile or an audience after the run starts doesn’t re-evaluate the run or update its data. Only in-journey nodes change a run’s context mid-flight: a fetch node that pulls new data, or an update-profile step. Both merge into the stored context. Branch on data you pass at invoke or fetch during the run, not on edits made elsewhere.

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Delays

A delay node waits before continuing, in two modes:

• Duration (relative): wait a span, like 3 days.
• Until (absolute): wait for a timestamp, which can come from your data, like an appointment_time field.

A single delay can wait up to 93 days. Courier rejects a longer delay. Chain delays for a longer total gap.

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Idempotency

Invoking is safe to retry. Send an Idempotency-Key header on the invoke request. For a repeated key, Courier returns the stored result instead of starting a second run, so a network retry doesn’t double-send. Without the key, each invoke starts a new run.

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Canceling a run

To stop runs, cancel them. The cancel endpoint takes either a cancelation_token (set in the journey’s settings and stamped on each run as it starts, cancels every run sharing it) or a single run_id. Only active runs are affected. A run that already finished, errored, or was canceled is left as-is. A journey can also cancel itself with an in-journey cancel node. See .

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Journey Templates

A send node’s content is a Journey Template: created inline in the send node, scoped to that Journey, and versioned with it. They are separate from the workspace used with the Send API. You can’t reference one from a regular send, or import an existing Template into a Journey. Journey Templates reference the Journey’s data with double-brace syntax:

• {{order_id}} for a trigger schema field
• {{first_name}} for a Profile field
• a field from an upstream fetch node

Publishing the Journey makes each linked Template’s current draft its active version. Editing a Template after publishing creates a new draft that needs a re-publish to take effect.

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FAQ