Mission
Why I am building Handler
A short letter about what this project is for, how I am trying to build it, and where I hope it goes with other people.
Community and actual usefulness
I did not start Handler to collect more notification volume. I started it because I needed something I could send from Alertmanager or a webhook and trust that it would reach my phone when it mattered. Slack and Discord are fine for chat. They are a weak place to put a page that has to wake you up.
What I want out of this, more than a polished landing page, is a group of people who actually use the thing and tell me when it fails them. That is the community part. The usefulness part is simpler: if you route real alerts through Handler, it should earn its place on your lock screen. Free access is there on purpose so someone with a homelab or a single on-call phone is not locked out while I figure out the rest.
Making the delivery path hard to break
I treat delivery as critical infrastructure. If the page never lands, every clever feature around it is decoration. So I separated the application API from the work that actually sends notifications. Workers pull from two queues, inbound and outbound, so accepting an alert and pushing it out do not sit on the same bottleneck.
The backend is a small Go service. I care that it stays light; on my machines a notification is processed on the order of tens of milliseconds on that path. The design is not tied to one cloud. You should be able to think in Docker, Kubernetes, or plain on-prem. For the hosted beta I run it on AWS because I need something that scales and that I can operate seriously. Native mobile apps (Kotlin and Swift) came after I dropped an earlier React Native prototype. That took longer, but reliability on the phone was the point.
A Community Edition on your own terms
I come from the self-hosted world and I still run a homelab. Hosted Handler is the practical way to ship real push today, because APNs and FCM expect certificates in a backend that can send, and I will not casually hand those secrets to every random instance on the internet.
That does not mean I want everyone stuck on my cloud forever. I want a Community Edition that you can run yourself, with your own rules about where data lives and who operates the stack. Same idea of alerts that cut through noise, your hardware, your boundaries. Until that exists, Free on the hosted side is how I keep the door open for people who need the service without paying.
Teams and businesses later in the same product
Right now Handler is honest about being useful for one person with a pager. Plenty of shops need more than that: shared channels, several phones, someone who can administer the org without asking me in Discord for every change.
I want a team and business side of the product for those cases. Not as a separate brand, and not as a bait that kills the solo path. Just the natural next surface when a platform team outgrows a single account.
Discord was there from the start
I stood up Discord when I opened the project, not as a marketing channel after the fact. I need somewhere people can complain early, paste a broken webhook, argue about how self-host should work, or say the Android build is rough on their phone.
If you have an opinion, that is the place. I read it. I would rather hear what is wrong while there is still time to fix it than guess alone and ship the wrong thing for your stack.
If you want to talk
Discord is open. Accounts are free if you just want to try sending a page to your phone.