What attn promises, and why it exists

A dead-simple personal alert service. You pair destinations you own, mint an API key, and POST a message to ping yourself on Telegram, in your browser, or by SMS. Think “PagerDuty, but way simpler” — for one person.

Most alerting tools assume a team, an on-call rota, and per-seat billing. Sometimes you just want your own scripts, jobs, and agents to tap you on the shoulder. attn does that one thing with the least possible ceremony.

No, by design. A notification can only reach channels you have paired and verified. There is no recipient field. That keeps attn spam-free and keeps you in control.

Yes — attn.ca/status reports database and cache health, whether the notification queue is draining, and delivery success per channel over a rolling window. It’s cached for about a minute so checking it never adds load to the system it’s reporting on.

Each accepted notification is fanned out to every verified channel in parallel and retried independently per channel with backoff, up to 5 attempts — delivery is at-least-once, and one channel having a bad minute (say, Telegram’s API timing out) never blocks or slows the others. Send an optional dedup_key so retries from your side are de-duplicated too.

Titles are capped at 256 characters and bodies at 4,000 — plenty for a real alert, not a place to paste a log file. Sending is rate-limited per account (60 requests/minute, 1,000/day) so a runaway script or misbehaving agent can’t turn into a flood.

Yes. Pair up to 10 Telegram chats, browsers, and SMS numbers in total; every verified channel receives each notification.

Turn on Do Not Disturb from your dashboard for a bounded window (up to 8 hours). Silenced notifications still appear in your activity as missed, and DND always expires on its own — there is no permanent mute, so you can’t forget it’s on.

Self-notification over Telegram and Web Push is free. SMS is in preview: because every text has a real carrier cost, it runs on prepaid credit, measured in SMS segments. You can buy credit yourself any time from the Billing tab (card via Stripe, Apple Pay/Google Pay supported), or an operator can grant it by hand. You are never auto-charged — when credit runs out, the SMS leg simply stops while your other channels keep delivering.

Your account, verified channels, and notification history. Notification content defaults to 90 days; you can choose 7, 30, 90, 365 days or delete settled history now from the Activity tab. When content is deleted or expires, attn redacts title, body, and dedup key while retaining delivery and SMS billing metadata for diagnostics and reconciliation. Channel secrets (Telegram chat ids, push endpoints) are never exposed back through the API.

Delete your settled notification history, remove your channels, and revoke your API keys from the dashboard. Revocation takes effect immediately. Deleting your pastebin.ca account does not currently send attn.ca an automatic deletion event, so complete these attn.ca steps first.

Yes — a JSON REST API and a first-class MCP server with 12 tools. See the developer guide, the MCP section, and openapi.json.

attn:notify sends, attn:read reads activity and status, attn:channels manages channels, and attn:delete redacts settled history. Keys are audience-bound to attn.ca.