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Most things in Tropos 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:

• Team Inbound Email - Each team in Tropos Alerts gets an email address that can be used to receive new alerts. The email address is based on the team's name and the name of your company. For example, if you have a team named "Rock Stars" in the "Andromeda" company, then your team's inbound email address will be [email protected].
• API - Each team gets an API endpoint that can be used to create new alerts.
• Voice Phone Calls - Each team can get an inbound phone number (note: this uses up some of your monthly notifications). Each team can choose between two options when a call is received on their number: 1) the caller can leave a voicemail which will be transcribed and converted to an alert. 2) the caller can routed to the team's on-call or managers.
• SMS Messages - The same phone number can be used to receive an inbound SMS to the team. The team has similar options as a voice call when an SMS is received: 1) the SMS can be converted to an alert. 2) the SMS can be forwarded to the team's primary on-call resources.

After an alert is received, it is automatically processed by a team's routing rules to determine what happens next.

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Tropos Alerts offers a variety of ways to get ahold of people within your company. These options include:

• Email
• SMS / Text
• Voice Phone Calls

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.

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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:

• An alert is created via inbound SMS to a team.
• A user on the team receives an escalation from an incident over SMS.
• A direct message is sent to the user over SMS from Tropos Alerts.
• In an incident, someone does an @mention to a user who has SMS as their notification preference.
• After an escalation from an incident is received by SMS, the user replies to the SMS "ACK" to acknowledge they're working on it.

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:

• An alert is created via a phone call lasting less than 1 minute.
• A user on the team receives an escalation from an incident over voice lasting less than 1 minute. They can acknowledge the incident by pressing a key during this phone call.
• A direct message is sent to the user over voice call lasting less than 1 minute from Tropos Alerts.
• In an incident, someone does an @mention to a user who has voice as their notification preference and the voice call lasts less than 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 Tropos 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.

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...

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