An introduction

I think it will be the best to start with introducing myself to the people who don’t really talk on our Discord server.

My name is Alex and I’m the person behind the Collectible Notifications service. The english is not my native language, so please excuse any possible grammatical and punctuational errors. I am also not that great at writing blog posts, so bear with me.

In this post I’d like to announce a few things and tell you about my future plans.

Happy birthday Collectible Notifications!

Today marks exactly 1 year since the very first version of Collectible Notifications was launched. Those of you who were there during the first days probably remember how basic the service was. We’ve come a long way since then. I haven’t implemented as much features as I wanted, but it is still miles ahead of the very first version we’ve had.

I would like to thank everyone who has been using the service since day 1, you guys are the reason all of this was made in the first place.

Collectible Notifications is no more, meet MyRestockAlerts

The name “Collectible Notifications” was something I made up really quickly because I just needed to enter something into the Discord server name field. So it is time for the service to get a proper name.

And that name is MyRestockAlerts. We will be migrating to the new branding in the upcoming days. As you might have already noticed this blog is already hosted on the new address.

We also have a new home page over at https://myrestockalerts.com.

Let’s talk about money

First of all I am really grateful to every single person who donated money either once or does so every month. Thanks to you the service is still alive.

With that said…

Pretty much everyone who has been using service long enough knows that I said that most of the features will be available to everyone for free.

I’m going to be honest, I said that because I was thinking “well, most of those people pay hundreds of dollars for figures every month, big chunk of them certainly will be willing to donate a few bucks every month, right?”.

Wrong.

Only 7% of the users donated any amount of money at least once and only 2% of the users have chosen to do so every month.

Unfortunately the amount of money I get after all fees are paid is just not enough to cover the current server costs, let alone make any improvements to the service performance.

Besides that there is one thing that bothers me - some of our users have very high amount of subscriptions. We are talking about situation when 10% of the users are responsible for 90% of active subscriptions. Most of those people never donated any amount of money despite being responsible for most of the load on the service.

This cannot continue for much longer and therefore later this year I will start limiting the amount of simultaneous subscriptions user can have based on the donation status and possibly making additional adjustments to other features.

The details will be shared at a later date, but one I can say for certain: as a token of appreciation this limitation will not affect anyone who donated any amount of money before February 19, 2022.

I know this sounds like I want to make money on this service, but this is not the case. As long as the service makes enough money to cover running costs and expansion, that’s good enough for me. Any money on top of that is just a nice bonus.

The future

I have a lot of stuff planned. Some of it was supposed to be finished by the time this post is made public, but I spent most of the january recovering from COVID and still have a lot of personal stuff to deal with, so no progress was made.

With that said here is the rough list of currently planned updates in no particular order (does not include internal improvements):

Proper support for multiple releases of a single product. This includes complete rewrite of how products are requested and stored. This is 60-70% complete right now.
Moving help from discord to the website.
Fixes of reported bugs.
Push notifications via web browsers. This will allow users to receive notifications on desktop and mobile (Android). As a part of this update Discord notifications will be made optional.
Support for additional stores.
Mobile experience improvements.
Product metadata (character name, etc) and ability to use it in search.
Integration with ko-fi. This will allow donators to receive their perks automatically.
Allow logging in via other services like Google.

Asking for a favor

I am really bad at public relations. So I want to ask you guys to let other people know this service exists if you have a chance, I’d really like to see it grow, the best reward for me is the ability to see that the service helps a lot of people.

And that’s it!

That’s it for now, thank you for your time. If you have any questions you can reach me via our Discord server or Discord’s direct messages (Alexsey#9211).

Until next time!