Today, we are embarking on a significant redesign of Courier's interface consisting of some new things, some old things in new places, and an overall reorganization of the information architecture. This redesign aims to address the challenges that come with the growth of our platform, where increased size and number of features leads to increased complexity, resulting in a product that may not be as intuitive for new users.

We are excited to introduce Guard Rails, now in open beta for Courier, a feature that allows you to set upper limits on the number of messages sent per time period. Courier business plan customers can configure these limits globally, or per user, or per user per subscription topic. Exclusions for certain subscription topics can also be set up, ensuring essential messages are always delivered.

We added the ability to customize the message icon for inbox messages. That means you can set a different icon for each type of notification that you send. To do this, Message Icons needs to be enabled in your brand’s in-app settings (they should be by default). Then you can add an icon to your notification template.

All apps need a solid, automated notifications system. Whether it’s reminders, updates, or alerts, some notifications can be urgent and time-sensitive, in which case SMS is the most effective communication channel. Let’s take a moment to talk about what that means for you as a developer. You need to: Realistically, building this feature from scratch can be time-consuming and complicated.

The ability to unify all notification metrics and logs across channels and providers into an easy-to-use dashboard is a core advantage of Courier’s notification infrastructure. However, with product notifications so critical to the entire application experience, it’s important to connect that data back to central cloud observability platforms that look across the entire stack.

We are thrilled to announce the release of our first client-side SDK for Courier, written for JavaScript. This new addition expands our existing SDK offerings, which include Java, Python, Node, Go, Ruby, and PHP, and makes it even easier for developers to integrate Courier into their projects.

Courier Automations lets you build smart notification workflows. With Automations, notifications can be scheduled, driven by events, canceled, and more. We’ve just completed a big redesign of the automations UI — before this overhaul, notifications were restricted to linear workflows. This made it difficult to build more advanced automations, however the new automations UI, based on React Flow, allows you to build more sophisticated workflows, including those requiring branching logic.