What I built

A push notification service called Pocket Alert. It started as a personal fix: I had alerts scattered across email, Slack, a Telegram bot I wrote at 2am, and a couple of cron jobs that emailed me and were therefore ignored forever. I wanted one pipe — anything I run sends a message, my phone gets a push, done.

So the service is: a REST endpoint you POST to, apps on iOS and Android that receive it, and per-app channels so a deploy notice and a "disk is 94% full" don't buzz the same way.

The Chrome extension is the newest piece. When I'm at the desk, reaching for my phone to read an alert my computer caused is stupid. So the extension puts that same inbox in the toolbar.

What the extension does

• Inbox in the popup. Recent alerts as cards, filter by application, paginate up to 100 per page.
• Unread badge on the toolbar icon, updated on a poll (configurable, 2 min default).
• Desktop notifications for new messages, native ones.
• Mark as read / read-all, so the badge means something.
• Send from the browser. Title, body, app tag, to one device or broadcast to all.
• Drafts survive. Close the popup mid-message and your text and current tab are still there. Small thing, but it's the reason I stopped using my own first version.
• Light / dark / follow system.

Manifest V3. You paste an API key in Settings, it stays in extension storage on your machine, everything goes to the API over HTTPS.

What it's actually for

Reading, at the desk: CI finished/failed → badge, no unlocking the phone · Grafana/Datadog/Prometheus/UptimeRobot fires → full text in the popup instead of squinting at a lock screen · Stripe payment lands · a long scrape or migration ends and you know now, not 20 minutes later.

Sending, from the browser: send yourself a link or code before leaving the house · broadcast to every device at once · poke a teammate's device when Slack is the wrong place for "deploy going out now" · test what your alerts will look like on the phone before wiring up the real integration — this one saved me hours.

Where messages come from: REST (POST /v1/messages), no-code webhooks mapping incoming JSON, a CLI, and integrations for GitHub Actions, Grafana, Datadog, Prometheus, UptimeRobot, Stripe, Zapier, Make, n8n, Home Assistant. Plus an MCP server — an agent in Claude or Cursor tells you it finished while you're in another room. Now my most-used feature.

Cost, upfront

Extension free. Service free tier: 50/day, 1 device, 1 app, 1 webhook. Paid from $6/mo.

More detailed description of the extension: https://pocketalert.app/tools/extension

Install the extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pocket-alert/hnknmapadalodjkmikfhjnmbbhpbhbdk