Slack and Discord alerts shipped — five alert channels, one price.
Shipped Slack and Discord alert channels in Observare today. That makes five: email, SMS, Slack, Discord, and generic webhook. All included in the £5/month plan.
Both work the same way — you create a webhook in your platform (Slack Incoming Webhook or Discord Server Webhooks), paste the URL into Observare, and assign it to your monitors. Alerts arrive as colour-coded messages: red for down, amber for warnings, green for recovery.
We shipped both the same day because they're almost identical under the hood. Slack uses Block Kit, Discord uses embeds, but the pattern is the same: POST formatted JSON to a webhook URL. The generic webhook channel we shipped earlier this week forced us to solve the hard problems first (SSRF guard, dispatch wiring across all five monitor types, rich payloads). Slack and Discord were thin wrappers on top.
That's a pattern I'd recommend to other indie builders: ship the generic version first, then the platform-specific ones are trivial. We didn't build a Slack integration and a Discord integration — we built a webhook integration, then formatted the JSON differently for each platform.
WhatsApp is the last channel on the roadmap. Everything else — uptime, SSL, port, cron heartbeat monitoring, Stripe webhook logging, public status pages, and now five alert channels — is live and included.
Hey Michael, congrats on shipping Slack and Discord alerts, five channels all included for £5/month is really strong value!
Smart move building the generic webhook first and then layering Slack/Discord on top. That pattern is excellent advice for other indie builders.
Quick question: now that you have five alert channels live, which one are early users adopting the fastest (or requesting the most)?
Solid progress, the "everything included" positioning keeps getting stronger.
Thanks! Honest answer: I don't have real adoption data yet — I only opened signups today (literally hours ago), so "early users" are about to happen rather than already happening.
But here's what I can share from the build-in-public conversations so far: the channel that generated the most beta interest was the generic webhook, by a noticeable margin. The pattern was always "I already have PagerDuty / Opsgenie / my own internal tool wired up for ops alerts — as long as you can POST to a URL, I'm in." That's actually the reason I front-loaded the generic webhook ahead of the platform-specific ones.
On my own dogfood account (Observare monitors Observare), I've turned on email everywhere and SMS on the two or three things that would wake me up at 3am. Slack and Discord are off for me personally because I'm not in a team ops channel at this scale yet — but I expect that to flip once real customers start joining.
Let me come back to this in two weeks with actual signup data. Happy to follow up here or on the next build update if you're interested.
That makes a lot of sense, especially the webhook leading since it fits directly into existing workflows.
Interesting that you’re already using email vs SMS based on urgency, feels like that “severity → channel” mapping could become a really strong default for users as well.
Curious to see how that plays out once real usage data comes in. So yea I’m interested