Introduction
Implement product notifications your users will love — in minutes, not sprints.
Notika makes adding product notifications to your app, like automated email or Slack notifications, as easy as “vibe-coding”.
Unlike traditional notification services which require an API integration (i.e. engineering work), Notika securely sits on top of your database, and provides you with a team of AI agents to take care of everything from setup to optimization.
There’s no SDK to learn, API calls to make, or events to emit from your app code. Anyone on your team, whether they can code or not, can fully manage your product’s notifications in just minutes, which means you can free up valuable engineering resources to focus on what really matters: advancing your core product.
The traditional approach with notifications
When we say “notifications” in these docs, generally we’re talking about transactional notifications — the automated messages that deliver critical information to your users.
Think: welcome emails, reminders, password resets, daily digests, and general app notifications.
The best transactional notifications are timely, purposeful, and personalized. They can be delivered through email, SMS, Slack, push notifications, or directly in your app — wherever your users need them most.
On the surface, notifications appear simple to add. Just whip up a cron job, right? But in reality, notifications tend to balloon in complexity over time — especially if you want to get it right. You have to:
- Choose a notification service provider (or multiple for different channels), then learn their SDKs and integrate their API(s) into your app. You might also need to add routing logic between channels and querying code to fetch the right data for the templates.
- Persist notification events, taking into account idempotency.
- Design and build notification templates. Email client handling of HTML can be quite different from browser handling of HTML, so you need a separate process just for building email templates.
- Set up additional infrastructure, like cron scripts for scheduled notifications, retry logic for temporary failures, and message queues for notifications.
- Test and verify. This can be tricky since notifications are embedded in your app code - and especially so for workflows that span across time, like scheduled and delayed notifications.
- Sandbox your test emails to avoid accidentally sending test notifications to real users.
- Handle user subscription preferences to route notifications to the proper channel and determine whether the user wants to receive them.
- Capture and store engagement events (like opens, clicks, and bounces).
- Add additional infrastructure to handle scale and reliability, such as message queues and retry logic.
The result:
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Precious engineering time spent on notifications instead of on the product itself. Would you rather be iterating on notification retry logic or building your product?
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Slower product velocity. Notifications require constant back and forth between product/marketing and engineering, where parties are constantly waiting for the other:
“Can we change the content of this template?”
“Can we ensure users don’t receive this email twice?”
“Are the emails working?”
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Fragile pipelines that are scary to change. Teams often move fast and take shortcuts, leading to tech debt, unreliable/unscalable pipelines, and lost opportunities.
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A poor user experience resulting in poor user engagement. Both the quality and quantity of notifications suffer over time.
These are all inefficiencies stemming from the fact that notification logic is tightly coupled with your app code. What if we could decouple them?
The new way to manage notifications
It all starts with your database — your source of truth.
Think about it: when a key event happens in your app, such as an order update or user signup, it’s reflected as some change in your database.
This is where Notika comes in: Notika lets you securely hook into those database updates, in real-time, to kick off your workflows. From there, Notika’s infrastructure handles the rest: executing the remainder of the workflow, delivering notifications, monitoring, and optimizing engagement.
With Notika, you get the power of an event-driven architecture using your database as the source of truth, without having to set up extensive boilerplate infrastructure yourself.
But the real benefit? Unlocking the power of AI agents.
While traditional notification services only handle the delivery piece, Notika helps you setup workflows end-to-end and is database context aware.
This means the system has a deep understanding of what’s going on, your intent, and your data model for the relevant entities within the workflow- providing the perfect context for AI agents to be truly useful for you.
Meet your new AI-powered teammates:
Workflow Agent
Instantly builds you end-to-end production-ready notification workflows. Simply describe what you’d like to build and the Workflow Agent takes care of the rest.
Testing Agent
Automatically generates test scenarios and validates your notification workflows across different edge cases and user journeys.
Growth Agent
Studies your performance and data model, and delivers actionable recommendations to boost engagement, reduce churn, and retain users.
For more information, check out the AI agents page.
How Notika compares to alternatives
| Service | Built for non-engineers | Low learning curve | AI powered | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low-level APIs (Twilio, SendGrid, MailGun, Resend) | |||||
| Notification services (Courier, Novu, SuprSend, Knock) | |||||
| Marketing automation tools (MailChimp, CustomerIO, Klaviyo, Braze) | |||||
| ✨ Notika AI ✨ |
Who we are
The founders:
Former CTO/Cofounder (Series A startup), Ex-Google Engineer, Stanford CS (AI/ML)
Ex-Netflix Senior Engineer, Former Head of Engineering (Seed startup), Dartmouth
Across our combined 20+ years of software engineering experience, we’ve seen the same problems with notifications over and over again, and we are on a mission to fix them for all startups - by allowing anyone on your team to build, manage, and own notifications.
We’re grateful to be supported by our amazing institutional investors, venture partners, and team members. Reach out to us if you want to join the movement!