Question 1

What does Courier do?

Accepted Answer

Courier is a smart notification routing and orchestration platform that provides a unified API for sending notifications across multiple channels — email, SMS, push notifications, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and others — with intelligent per-user channel selection based on user preferences and availability. Rather than requiring developers to integrate separately with email providers, SMS providers, and push services, Courier acts as an abstraction layer that connects to all these providers and routes each notification to the most appropriate channel for each individual recipient.

The fundamental value proposition of Courier is solving the "right message, right channel, right user" problem. A Nigerian fintech sending a payment confirmation wants it to reach the user reliably — but does this particular user prefer email? Or push? Or SMS? And what if their push device token is stale? Courier addresses this by maintaining a user notification profile that records each user's channel preferences and available endpoints (email address, phone number, device tokens), and then routing each notification to the best available channel. If push fails, Courier can automatically fall back to SMS. If the user has set a preference for email only during work hours, Courier respects that.

Integration with existing notification providers is handled through Courier's provider integrations — a library of 50+ pre-built integrations with popular services including SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES (email), Twilio, Africa's Talking, Termii (SMS), Firebase, OneSignal (push), Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams (collaboration tools). Nigerian developers configure their existing provider accounts in the Courier integrations dashboard, and Courier uses those credentials to send through the connected providers. Switching email providers from SendGrid to Resend requires only changing the Courier integration configuration — no application code changes.

The no-code template editor in Courier allows creating branded notification templates for each channel without engineering involvement. Marketing and product teams at Nigerian companies can design email templates with their brand colors and logo, write SMS message templates with proper length constraints, and draft push notification content — all from the Courier dashboard. Templates support variable substitution for personalizing content (inserting recipient name, order details, amount, etc.) from the data provided in the API call.

Courier's approach differs from open-source alternatives like Novu primarily in its managed SaaS model. While Novu offers self-hosting as a primary option, Courier is a fully managed cloud service. Nigerian teams that prefer not to operate their own notification infrastructure will favor Courier's managed approach, while teams with strong DevOps capability and cost sensitivity at scale may prefer a self-hosted Novu deployment.

Notification logs and analytics in Courier provide visibility into every notification sent — delivery status, channel used, provider response, and error details. For Nigerian platform teams debugging delivery issues (why did user X not receive the payment confirmation?), Courier's logs make it possible to trace exactly what happened. Aggregated analytics show delivery rates, channel performance, and notification volume trends over time.

Audience segmentation allows sending notifications to defined groups of users from the Courier dashboard without a per-notification API call per user. Nigerian marketing teams can define an audience (all users who registered in the past 30 days in Lagos) and send a campaign notification to the entire segment through the Courier console.

The free plan (10,000 notifications per month) is sufficient for small-scale testing and early-stage Nigerian applications. Paid plans scale for production use. For Nigerian developers building notification infrastructure that should just work without becoming a maintenance burden, Courier offers a managed, intelligent routing layer that grows with the application.

Question 2

How much does Courier cost?

Accepted Answer

Courier is free to start, with paid tiers for higher usage (freemium). Free: 10,000 notifications/month. Paid from $99/month. Nigeria supported across all connected channels.

Question 3

How do I authenticate with the Courier API?

Accepted Answer

API Key (Auth Token)

Question 4

Is there a rate limit on Courier?

Accepted Answer

Free: 10,000 notifications/month. Paid plans scale.

Question 5

Does Courier offer a sandbox or test mode?

Accepted Answer

Yes — Courier provides a sandbox or test environment so you can integrate and test before going live.

Question 6

What is Courier best suited for?

Accepted Answer

Developers wanting a smart notification routing platform that automatically selects the best delivery channel per user (email, SMS, push, Slack, etc.) from a single API call with user preference management.

Question 7

Is there anything else I should know before integrating Courier?

Accepted Answer

Courier is a notification orchestration API that routes messages to the right channel per user. Connects to many providers (SendGrid, Twilio, FCM, etc.) and manages user notification preferences. Good alternative to Novu for managed SaaS approach.

Question 8

Where can I find Courier's documentation?

Accepted Answer

The official API documentation is at https://www.courier.com/docs. The provider's website is https://courier.com.

Question 9

Does Courier support Nigerian developers?

Accepted Answer

Yes — Courier explicitly supports Nigerian developers/use cases.

Courier

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