Most things in Squid Alerts start with an alert (at least the second half of our brand name makes sense).
Alerts are sent to a team through various means:
After an alert is received, it is automatically processed by a team's routing rules to determine what happens next.
Squid Alerts offers a variety of ways to get ahold of people within your company. These options include:
If you want to get ahold of something... not human... we have options for that, too. This includes webhooks as well as various integrations with 3rd party services.
Unfortunately, not all notifications are created equally. In a simple world, the number would always be 1. Actually in the simplest world, we'd have unlimited notifications, but alas, those notifications are not free.
Unless otherwise noted, all example calculations are based on the USA or UK.
A notification can be used in a variety of ways...
Each time an SMS message is sent or received by a team or user of the company, 1 notification is used for most messages.
Examples:
SMS messages are limited to 160 characters. If it is larger than 160 character, then it will be split into 153 character segments. Each of these segments count as a notifiction. For exampke, a 161-character message will count as 2 notifications. A 342-character SMS will counts as 3 notifications.
If a team receives an inbound SMS and it is forwarded to the primary on-call, it will count once when the message is received and again when the message is sent to the team member.
If your company has 100 users and you send an enterprise notification via SMS to the whole company, it will count as 100 notifications (assuming the notification is less than 160 characters).
Each time a voice call is sent or received by a team or user of the company, a notification is user per minute of the call.
Examples of notifications lasting 1 minute:
In each of these scenarios if the calls last 3 minutes, then 3 notifications would be used.
If a team an inbound phone call and it the call is connected to the primary on-call, it will continue counting notifications for each minute until the call ends. These calls are limited to 10 minutes.
If your company has 100 users and you send an enterprise notification via voice phone call to the whole company, it will count as 100 notification per minute of the phone call.
We wanted to make sure that even our cheapest plan could take advantage of 100% of Squid Alerts features. That's why we don't have an upcharge for inbound voice or SMS phone numbers. Or as we like to call it, virtual cell phones.
But, we pay our service providers for each number procured so we have to have some way of ensuring a single company doesn't go get 5,000 phone numbers. So, each team phone number requires 100 monthly notifications. For example, if you are on our Startup Plan, your company is allocated 1,000 notifications per month. If the company has 2 teams with inbound phone numbers, then they still have 800 notification remaining for the month. Teams are NOT required to have inbound phone numbers, so you can still have unlimited teams.
If your company has an established number, your customers and business partners are already used to that by now. Save time, money, and the hassle of informing everyone by porting your company number through Squid Alerts. Your customer engagement will go on uninterrupted.
Email is cheap. So we count them as zero notifications in all scenarios.
These are all zero from our side, but if the other guys charge you, sorry...
Currently we 100% support the +1 country code (USA and Canada) as well as +44 country code (UK / GB). We are open to supporting other countries, but pricing / notification calculation may be different. Please reach out to [email protected] for additional details.