Some months ago, I developed One Notif, a project where, I receive a single reminder about important stuff for me today, so I don’t check 800 apps. Although it contained only birthdays and weather at the moment, this was already pretty good for my life and had a positive impacts on my relationships.

How it was setup was simple, Id read from a config file, and send the result using Twilio, directly to my phone.

However I ran out of Twilio free money last months. I went to check their paid offer and it was not interesting for me at the moment. I want to use this app to send messages to a small number of people, unfortunately scattered into several countries. This would mean either renting a lot of phone numbers, or having a cost of ~10 cents/per day/per user.

It’s a bit much so I pivoted toward Discord which is where most of my online time is nowadays. It was very easy to setup something thanks to their webhook functionality. As explained in this cool guide from birdie0 you just need to send a post request. So you can just do:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username": "test", "content": "hello"}' "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/123/w3bh00k_t0k3n"

And that’s all. It just works which is amazing in 2023. I will probably update this project to be able to send periodic ticker info and news/rss too. We will see!