Dispatch — bring-your-own-key comms gateway
Customers bring their own Twilio/SMTP/Slack creds; we run the routing, dedup, escalation and audit trail.
Notification systems lock you in via bundled SMS or proprietary channels. Customers were paying twice — for our service AND for their own underused Twilio account.
Stateless gateway. Customer adds their existing API keys; we route, dedupe, escalate, retry, audit. They own the relationship with the underlying carriers; we own the orchestration.
Optional: classify incoming alerts by urgency to decide channel + escalation. Off by default; opt-in.
Designed the routing rules language and the on-call rota model.
Dispatch now sits behind every alerting product we run. Customers like that they can fire us and keep their Twilio account.
Tried to be smart about deduping at first; ended up suppressing alerts customers actually wanted. Default is now 'pass through unless you opt in to dedup'.
BYOK as a positioning play. It signals 'we're not trying to lock you in' louder than any marketing copy.
- 01BYOK lowers the trust barrier dramatically for ops-heavy buyers.
- 02Default to pass-through behaviour; let users opt into smart filtering.
- 03Audit trail is a feature, not an afterthought — for many buyers it's the buying reason.