RelayGrid

Hello all,

As promised I have just released a new SDK. This time for Node. After working on the Ruby Gem, the nodejs lib was much easier to produce since all of the requirements are planned and all the kinks are worked out.

The package is available here to download from npmjs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/relaygrid

As always you can start for free at https://relaygrid.dev and I am here to answer any questions.

Hello all,

As I was trying to create notification templates for welcome emails and other events in RelayGrid, I realized not all values are always known. I ask for minimal information when creating an account to reduce friction, but this means that I cannot use whatever I collected in my notifications. This made me think of two things that are missing from notification templates.

1. Default values
2. Conditional values

I tried to think through both missing features and realized the default values are much easier to implement. So I decided to work on that first and here we are. The idea is simple, If a value is missing, substitute it with a predefined value. The notation is similar to the existing template variables in RelayGrid. Currently, you can specify a variable by typing {{variableName}}. I decided to keep the notation mostly unchanged. Now you can type {{variableName|Default Value}}. If a value not passed in for variableName or there is none available in the database, then the "Default Value" will be used. It is live and ready to be used so give it a try and let me know if it works well and what you would change if any.

Next I will be working on conditional blocks. If a value exists, print this, otherwise print something else. I am thinking of using the Rails format of {% variableName %} but still haven't fully the decided yet. I'm open to ideas :)

We are out of the beta period but you can still join for free with very generous limits. Sign up at https://relaygrid.dev.

Hello all,

In the past few years, we've seen a wave of SaaS applications rushing to add LLMs to every feature they can find. Most of these additions feel rushed, driven by the fear of missing the hype train rather than a desire to solve a problem. As a result, the UX suffers. The default approach seems to be a generic chatbot tucked in the corner of the UI or a million annoying pop-ups that try to beat you into submission.

About a year and a half into working on RelayGrid, I decided it was time to add AI capabilities to the platform. I waited for two reasons. Firstly, I did not feel like it needed it; secondly, I felt the core features needed to be polished enough that adding AI would be a legitimate feature, not a bandaid.

To give some context: RelayGrid is finally at a point where I can "dogfood" its own features. I am now sending notifications to my own users using RelayGrid. The first step in that process is creating a Notification Template.

They say that to build a great product, you should solve a problem you personally face and I've always had a hard time writing these types of message bodies. So I built an AI Assistant specifically to help me write template subject and bodies.

It isn't an autonomous agent. It is specialized tool designed to generate content. By treating the LLM as a "helper function" rather than a primary interface, I was able to keep the UI focused on what actually matters: the reliability an delivery of your messages.

We are officially moving out of beta.

You can sign up and start exploring for free at relaygrid.dev, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new template assistance (with 14-day free trial) specifically if you think the "helper function" approach actually works for your workflow.

Email me at ali@relaygrid.dev or on our support page with any questions or issues.

Hello all,

Webhooks are live. Until now, if you wanted to know whether a notification actually made it, you had to keep asking us, send, get a delivery id back, then poll until the answer stopped changing. The gem even had a helper to do that waiting for you, which I now realize was me automating a workaround instead of fixing the problem. Along this release I also released the Ruby gem v0.2.0.

You give us one URL in your settings, and from then on we tell you when something happens: queued, sent, delivered, opened, failed, bounced, for email and push. Every message is signed, so you can prove it came from us and not from whoever else finds your URL. In Ruby the gem verifies that for you in a single call, and for everything else the docs have working Node and Python examples to copy. If your server is down we keep retrying for a few hours, and if it stays down we switch the endpoint off and tell you rather than quietly hammering it forever.

The interesting part was what this dug up. Our sender used to mark a delivery as failed before retrying it, so a notification that succeeded on the second attempt had spent a moment looking dead. Nobody ever noticed, because anything that keeps polling just sees the happy ending. As a webhook it becomes a 3am alert followed by a "never mind" two minutes later. So there is now a separate "retrying" state, and you can finally tell "still trying" from "gave up" without guessing. I had been sitting on that one for weeks without knowing.

Docs are at relaygrid.dev/docs/webhooks, with the Ruby specifics at relaygrid.dev/docs/ruby-gem. We are close to ending the free beta period, so anyone who contacts me with a beta key request will receive a year of free subscription. Use the contact form on the website or email me at ali@relaygrid.dev.

Hello all,

After a few weeks of work, revising plans, and throwing out an API I was sure was fine right up until I tried to actually use it... the RelayGrid Ruby gem is now live. Add gem "relaygrid" to your Gemfile and you can send notifications from Ruby or Rails in a single call.

The idea is that you hand it a user, a template name, and whatever attributes that template needs, and it handles the rest. You don't have to register the user first, it used to need that, hence the redesign. If they're new they get created as part of the send, along with their email address. You get back a delivery id per channel so you can check later whether each one actually made it, and if the template has a push channel you also get a token you can hand to the browser or device for real-time updates over websockets. Push and email, together or separately.

Writing the client is also what showed me how many rough edges were still in the API. A few endpoints got noticeably better along the way, which I did not expect to be the main benefit of shipping a client library.

Get in touch to suggest the next SDK! For now I am thinking Node.js, but I am open to working on a different one if you need it.

Docs are at relaygrid.dev/docs/ruby-gem. We are close to ending the free beta period, so anyone who contacts me with a beta key request will receive a year of free subscription. Use the contact form on the website or email me at ali@relaygrid.dev.

Hello all,

After about a month of work, lots of bug fixes, questioning my architectural decisions, and making more sane ones... The email functionality is now live.

You can either use noreply@relaygrid.dev for free or bring in your own email provider with SMTP. A very inexpensive option that allows custom domains and has worked well for me in the past is https://purelymail.com/.

With this release you can send email and push either separately or at the same time. I am also including email branding as part of this release. You can either use a pre-made layout for the emails with your own header/footer text, or you can make custom email layout with html.

We are still in the free beta period so anyone who contacts me with a beta key request will receive a year of free subscription. Use the contact form on the website or email me at ali@relaygrid.dev.

Hello all,

I've put up a closed beta for RelayGrid. I would love to get some beta users to integrate it in their apps and give me any feedback. In return when the platform graduates from beta, you'll get the paid subscription for free for a year. You also get to help shape the features and their priorities... it's like getting your personal notifications infrastructure dev for free :)

Either hit me up or go directly to https://relaygrid.dev?ref=indiehacker request a code.

I'm the only dev working on it so whatever issues you have I'll personally look into and work on.