Open book
Status and speed
A service that sells speed and will not show its speed is selling a feeling. This is the measured state of things, including the times it was slow.
What the platform does
requests per day
How fast it lands on your screen
The time between "we saw it" and "it is on your screen". These are assumptions, based on how each channel works. Once alerts have gone out, the measured time of the last 24 hours appears on the right. Next to it, what people with more than one channel say themselves: which one arrived first?
| Channel | Tier | Expected | Why | Measured | Experienced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browser alert fastest | free | under a second | Straight to your phone's or browser's notification service. On an iPhone, iOS sometimes holds it back briefly to save battery. | — | — |
| Telegram fastest | free | under a second | One message to the bot, Telegram passes it on right away. | — | — |
| thinking about it | about a second | Meta accepts it fast and delivers at once. If you have not messaged in 24 hours it goes out as a fixed template. That is WhatsApp's rule, not ours. | — | — | |
| Discord | thinking about it | under a second | A webhook into a channel. Fast, but for a group and not a personal alert. | — | — |
| Signal | one day, maybe | one to three seconds | Runs through our own Signal server. Secure, and the slowest of the push channels. | — | — |
| SMS | thinking about it | two to ten seconds | We hand it over within a second; the mobile network does the rest, sometimes with delay. | — | — |
| no alert | deliberately off | Spam filters sometimes hold mail for minutes to hours, and an alert in a full inbox is not an alert. We use mail only to confirm your sign-up and to log you in. | — | — | |
| A phone call | one day, maybe | later | With a credit, for those who must not miss an alert. | — | — |
The fastest channels are free. A search pass buys reach and filters, not seconds. One alert goes to all your channels at once; the fastest arrives first.
From spotted to delivered
The chain has two halves. The first is fetching: how long between an advert going live and us seeing it. The second is delivering: how long between seeing it and sending it. They are shown separately because a slow first half means something entirely different from a slow second half.
The log
The last twenty homes we saw and how long it took until the first alert went out. The source is named, the home is not: this is a log, not a shop window. What is open right now is on the listings page.
How much is actually out there
Counted from our own feed logs. This is also the test of the assumptions in the business plan: not what we hoped for, but what we measured. More detail on the numbers page.