Send notifications with Python

Courier is one API for every channel your product notifies through: email, SMS, push, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and an in-app inbox. You send once; Courier renders the template, picks the channel from the user’s preferences and your routing, and delivers through the providers you already use. This guide gets a Python app from zero to a delivered notification, then adds channel routing and a multi-step journey. About five minutes. What you need

A Courier account. Start free.
A Test API key from Settings → API Keys. Set it as COURIER_API_KEY.
A user in Courier with an email or phone number. Step 2 creates one through the API.

Building with an AI agent? Install the Courier skill and your agent knows the API, the channels, and the patterns on this page.

npx skills add trycourier/courier-skills

Setup for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, plus the hosted MCP server, is in Build with AI.

1. Install the SDK

pip install trycourier

The SDK is a typed client for the whole API and runs on Python 3.9 and later. Request params are TypedDicts and responses are Pydantic models, so your editor autocompletes both. It reads COURIER_API_KEY from the environment, so there is nothing to configure for the first send.

2. Create a user

Courier is built around users, not addresses. A user profile holds the email, phone number, push tokens, and chat handles for one person, plus their notification preferences. Once it exists, every send names the user and Courier works out where to reach them. Your code never handles a contact detail again.

from courier import Courier

client = Courier()

client.profiles.create(
    "user_123",
    profile={"email": "ada@example.com", "phone_number": "+15555550123"},
)

create merges into an existing profile and leaves any key you omit alone. Use client.profiles.replace(...) when you want a full overwrite.

3. Send a notification

A send names a template and a user, and passes the data specific to this event. The template lives in Design Studio, where it holds the content for every channel and the routing rules, so a copy change or a new channel never needs a deploy. The idempotency key means a retried request returns the original response instead of sending twice.

response = client.send.message(
    message={
        "template": "order-confirmation",
        "to": {"user_id": "user_123"},
        "data": {"order_id": "ORD-456", "total": "$99.99"},
    },
    idempotency_key="order-confirmed-ORD-456",
)

response.request_id

The call returns a request_id. Open Message Logs and you will see the request, the channel Courier chose, the provider it used, and the delivery status as it updates.

4. Route across channels

Routing normally lives in the template, but a send can override it when the code knows something the template does not. single tries channels in order and stops at the first that delivers; all sends on every listed channel. The user’s preferences still apply on top, so a user who has opted out of SMS gets the email, and a user with no phone number on file does too.

client.send.message(
    message={
        "template": "password-reset",
        "to": {"user_id": "user_123"},
        "routing": {"method": "single", "channels": ["sms", "email"]},
        "data": {"reset_url": "https://app.example.com/reset/abc"},
    },
)

5. Start a journey

Some notifications are sequences: a welcome email now, a reminder tomorrow if setup is not finished, a different path for team plans. A journey is that sequence built in a visual editor as steps that send, wait, branch on user data, or digest a burst of events into one message. You publish it once, and your code only has to start it. When the sequence changes, the editor changes; the invoke call does not.

invocation = client.journeys.invoke(
    "new-signup-onboarding",
    user_id="user_123",
    data={"plan": "team"},
)

run = client.journeys.runs.retrieve(invocation.run_id)
run.run.status  # PROCESSING, WAITING, PROCESSED, CANCELED, ERROR, THROTTLED, NOT PROCESSED

retrieve returns the run nested under run, and status is a plain string rather than an enum, so compare it as one and expect values to be added over time.

Confirm delivery

A request fans out to one message per recipient and channel, and each message moves through its own lifecycle: enqueued, sent to the provider, delivered, opened, clicked. Look a message up by ID to read where it is.

message = client.messages.retrieve(message_id)
message.status  # ENQUEUED, SENT, DELIVERED, OPENED, CLICKED, UNDELIVERABLE

For production, subscribe to an outbound webhook instead of polling: Courier posts each status change to your endpoint as it happens. Working in an async framework? Import AsyncCourier instead of Courier and await every call. The method names and arguments are identical.

Next steps

Working example: this guide as a runnable project.
Add an in-app inbox with the React or web component SDK.
Let users set preferences.
Send API reference: every field.
Python SDK reference.

Quickstarts

Platform

Developer Tools

Help

Send notifications with Python

1. Install the SDK

2. Create a user

3. Send a notification

4. Route across channels

5. Start a journey

Confirm delivery

Next steps

​1. Install the SDK

​2. Create a user

​3. Send a notification

​4. Route across channels

​5. Start a journey

​Confirm delivery

​Next steps

1. Install the SDK

2. Create a user

3. Send a notification

4. Route across channels

5. Start a journey

Confirm delivery

Next steps