FAQ
Which are the supported IM platforms?
At the moment EZAlert.me supports the following platforms:
- Telegram
- Facebook Messenger (temporarily suspended)
- Skype
- Slack (via Webhooks)
- Discord (via Webhooks)
- Teams (via Webhooks)
How long alert text can be?
EZAlert.me supports messages long up to 4096 chars. Some additional limit can apply on the destination istant messaging platform.
Can I send alerts to anyone?
Yes, but whoever needs to receive your alerts must first register to your EZAlert.me channel, sending a message to EZAlert.me BOT containing the channel start code.
Each channel has a different start code, so only people that know the code can receive your alerts.
This registration process also prevents the use of EZalert.me to deliver marketing or unsolicited messages.
EZAlert.me can only be used as an alerting tool, it is not for marketing and respect user privacy!
Why I have to send a message to EZAlert.me bot to receive Alerts?
We designed EZAlert.me to be an alerting broadcast gear. We did our best to prevent it to be used to send unsolicited messages to people not willing to receive them. That's why every user who wants to receive alerts, have to manually add EZAlert.me bot and send it a startup message with the code of the channel they want to subscribe to. We think this is a very effective way to prevent EZAlert.me to became a spam distibution platform!
Is EZAlert.me free?
EZAlert.me can be used for free with a daily usage limit.
In the future we will probably add paid plans that will provide advanced features, like more than one channel per account, a higher daily alert delivery rate limit, and higher priority messages.
Can I send an unlimited number of alerts?
No, there is a daily limit in the number of alerts you can send. This limit exists to avoid the platform collapse.
In the free plan the limit is set to 20 Alerts messages per day.
Why the API limit is so low?
Since anybody can use EZAlert.me for free, we need to limit the use of the platform of each account to allow all users to benefit from our free alerts delivery service.
How I know whether I am hitting the daily alert limit?
Each API response will include a x-ezalertme-apilimit header that will expose the number of calls you did and actual daily limit.
Example: if in the reply of the EZAlert.me API call you get
x-ezalertme-apilimit: 3/20
it means that you sent 3 alerts of the 20 available in the day.
In any event if you go over the limit the API will reply with an error.
Daily counting is reset at midnight GMT time.
Will you support more IM platforms in the future?
Yes, definitely.
We are working on that and the more people will use and support EZAlert.me the more effort we will spend in adding new features.
However, we also have to consider that not all instant messaging platforms can be connected.
Why don't you support Whatsapp?
At the moment Whatsapp only allows bot to send messages paying a fee. Since the fee is rather high we are not able to provide a free delivery service to it.
Anyway we will be more than happy to add Whatsapp in the future if things change or if we find that EZAlert.me users that ask for the service are also willing to pay for it.
In the meanwhile, we strongly suggest you to give Telegram a try.
How do you process alerts?
Once your program/device calls EZAlert.me API to send an alert, the alert is stored in a queue with all the alerts sent by all the other users.
Alerts queue is usually processed in a first-in-first-out fashion, but we also planning to have queue priorities for paying customers in the future.
Are all the alerts delivered?
We do our best to transport your alerts to destination, but Internet is a complex ecosystem and many things can go wrong in the transport process.
This means that EZAlert.me uses a best effort strategy to deliver your alerts but we can't guarantee they will be always delivered.
In your reserved area in EZAlert.me system, you can access your channels log and statistics pages.
Are the alerts I send via EZAlert.me secure?
We do our best to keep our systems safe. Anyway all the alerts processed by EZAlert.me are stored in unencrypted form, so we strongly suggest you to not send sensible/classified data via EZAlert.me.
EZAlert.me aim is to allow you a convenient way to be notified about events from automatic systems, and is not intended to be suitable for transporting confidential information.
My device can't call APIs but it can email alerts. Does EZAlert.me support it?
Yes! Each EZAlert.me channel also has an email gateway that can deliver email alerts via istant messages.
What kind of user data do you collect from the IM?
EZAlert.me collects and stores the minimum viable set of data needed to provide you the service: usually only the username and full name you used on the IM. We are not interested in collecting user data. For more details please refer to our privacy policy.
What kind of messages will you send me via IM?
EZAlert.me will only send you messages strictly related to the service itself. If you connect to one of EZAlert.me bots you will receive the alerts sent via API or email gateway and few very rare general communications about the service itself (like maintenance schedules, service changes, and so on). We do not and will not spam, send advertisement or any other messages which is not strictly related with EZAlert.me service.