In 2022, Dima and I set out to build Novu with a straightforward mission: to simplify meaningful communication between businesses and their users and customers. In this time, product-to-consumer communication continues to grow in visibility and importance.

We believe that notifications should never be an afterthought in product design. When done well, notifications are a powerful way to increase user engagement and deliver more value from your application. When done poorly, they can also have an outsized impact, too. Reduced engagement, increased app uninstalls, and significant damage to your user experience, and even brand, and most importantly, a very frustrating experience for the engineering teams while in development, deployment, or maintenance. For these reasons, notifications are increasingly regarded as a first-class citizen by app design, development, and product teams. And rightly so!

What started as an NPM stateless library with just 60 lines of code has blossomed into the largest open source project of its kind. In 2023, Novu was among the fastest growing open source projects worldwide—a trend that continues this year, too. We are all smarter together, and the vast and highly active Novu Community is a testament to the importance that many organizations now place on effective notifications. The Novu Community directly and positively impacts and benefits every Novu Project user and Novu Platform customer in meaningful ways.

The (bigly) numbers

By the end of 2023, the hosted Novu Platform was processing well more than 250 million notification events every month, and we’ve continued to grow into 2024. We estimate that the hosted Novu Notifications Infrastructure Platform will easily exceed five billion delivered notifications this year alone… and that doesn’t include the hundreds of organizations that have integrated the Novu Project libraries into their own stacks.

Scale is always on our minds, and we continue to ensure that our hosted service will scale to any notification volume you can throw at it, whether using the UI or API—and these efforts will directly and positively benefit you, our community and customers.

One point remains: we couldn’t have gotten here without each of our community users, contributors, open beta users, and our paying customers. Each of you have contributed valuable insight as we build out our platform, and our entire Novu team is grateful for your contributions and feedback.

Product and innovation

The last several years have been full of learning and growing for the Novu team, our project, and hosted service. I’m excited to announce that we’re moving to the next stage of our business. We are now closing down our open beta program, and have re-tooled our pricing and packaging, to help continue promoting broad (and free!) adoption, while providing a trusted, stable, and scalable growth path for our users and customers that are basing their mission-and-application critical notifications infrastructure on Novu.

As we look to 2024 and beyond, we’re making large investments across the Novu Project and hosted service:

1. Providing a developer-first experience that still enables development teams to collaborate with product, and other non-dev teams.
2. Seamlessly scale to any volume, in real time, with an EU or US-based hosted platforms.
3. Delivering enterprise-level features such as SSO, RBAC and audit logging.
4. Creating a rich, code or UI-driven content management experience.
5. A fully supported on-premises-deployed solution that 100% mirrors our hosted capabilities.
6. A new developer-focused mode of notifications content development and interaction.

With our open source pedigree, a focus on community empowerment and enablement, and the broad adoption we enjoy, we’re can’t wait to get these capabilities (and more!) into the hands of eager users looking to build atop the next generation of notification infrastructure.

Stressless notifications

We founded Novu because we recognized that doing notifications well is both an art and a science, but the tooling needed to build effective notifications shouldn’t be something that has to be built every time.

Our goal is to remove the stress and heavy-lifting that has previously defined the notifications space, and enable teams to consider easily how their notifications strategy and implementation factors into their overall customer and end user experience.

Whether you have one hundred or one hundred million (or more!) subscribers, I think you’ll find Novu easy to adopt, use, and a platform that will grow with you.

You’ve been notified. We’re not going to stop innovating, investing in our amazing community, and will stop at nothing to deliver the industries best, most powerful, flexible, and trusted notifications infrastructure platform.