Subscribers

Subscribers receive notifications when you open an incident, post an update, or schedule maintenance. They sign up themselves from the public status page.

Channels

Verification

All channels use double opt-in. After signing up the subscriber receives a verification message. Notifications only go out after the link or code in that message is confirmed.

This is required by GDPR and prevents abuse (someone subscribing a third party without consent).

The form gives the same answer whether or not an address is already subscribed, so nobody can find out from the outside who follows your page. If an address that already follows the page is entered again, its owner gets an email with the link to manage the subscription. An already subscribed phone number gets no extra SMS. It keeps receiving your messages as before.

Visitors can only choose the channels you switched on in the status page settings. With email off, the form offers only SMS or webhook, and with every channel off, it disappears.

SMS allowance

SMS cost us money per message, so every plan with SMS includes a monthly allowance: 250 SMS on Pro, 1,000 on Business, for the whole workspace. It covers SMS to subscribers, the confirmation codes for new SMS subscribers and alerts from your HTTP checks.

• What one SMS is: up to 160 characters. Umlauts are fine. A message with an emoji or another character outside the SMS character set fits only 70. A longer message counts as several SMS.
• Warnings: at 80 % and 90 % of the allowance and when it is used up, everyone in the workspace who can see the billing gets an email.
• When it is used up: SMS come from your SMS packs. Without any, SMS pause until the next month. Email, webhooks and chat integrations carry on as usual, so your subscribers still hear about everything, just not by SMS.
• Where to see it: under Plan & billing → SMS, through the API with GET /api/v1/sms-usage.

Component subscriptions (Pro+)

By default subscribers receive notifications for every incident on the page. On Pro and above, subscribers can pick specific components or component groups — they only hear about incidents affecting those.

Useful when a page covers many independent services and not every subscriber cares about all of them.

Per-maintenance notification control

When scheduling a maintenance, you choose which lifecycle events trigger notifications:

• Scheduled — when the maintenance is created
• Reminder — one hour before it starts
• Started — when status flips to In Progress
• Completed — when it ends

You can turn each phase on or off, or disable notifications entirely with a master toggle.

Adding through the API

POST /api/v1/subscribers adds a subscriber the way the form on your page does:

• Email: the person gets the confirmation email and is in only after clicking it. Lost it? POST /api/v1/subscribers/{id}/resend-verification sends it again — at most three times an hour per address.
• SMS: the number confirms itself with the code we send. This cannot be skipped.
• Webhook: we send one signed test call to the address right away. If it answers 2xx, the subscriber is confirmed; otherwise nothing is created (422, webhook_unreachable).
• With skip_verification an email address or webhook is confirmed at once. Use it only for people who agreed elsewhere. While the first invoice of an annual plan on invoice is unpaid, it is refused (403, awaiting_payment).
• The same address, number or webhook URL a second time returns the existing subscriber.
• The page's switches apply as on the form: with subscriptions or email subscribers off, the API refuses (403, channel_unavailable).
• A CSV import through the API confirms with consent: true that everyone listed agreed, as the dashboard asks.
• Undeliverable subscribers carry undeliverable_at and undeliverable_reason; ?undeliverable=1 lists only them.

Importing subscribers

Moving from another provider, you do not have to retype your list. Under Status Pages → Subscribers → Import you upload a file.

Two formats are recognised:

• One address per line — plain and sufficient.
• CSV with a header row — one column must be called email; other columns are ignored.

Imported subscribers count as confirmed and receive no verification email. That is deliberate — they had already agreed. It also means: only import lists where that is actually true. A bought list, or one assembled from a customer directory, is not a subscriber list, and the first spam complaints hurt deliverability for all your other subscribers.

Addresses already subscribed to the page are skipped rather than duplicated. After the import you see how many were added, skipped, or rejected for an invalid format.

Your subscriber quota applies here too: addresses are imported up to your plan's limit, the rest are not. The result tells you how many were added and how many skipped — duplicate, invalid or over the quota.

Through the API you import the same CSV file with POST /api/v1/subscribers/import.

Self-service management

Every subscriber notification email contains a Manage preferences and Unsubscribe link. Subscribers can choose the components they hear about (if your plan includes component subscriptions) or unsubscribe, without contacting you. For another channel they subscribe again with it.

Language

Every notification comes in the language you set for the status page (see Settings). The confirmation email, the updates and the pages for managing and unsubscribing all speak the same language as your page.

Sender and replies

Which address notifications come from, where your subscribers' replies go, and how to send through your own mail server are covered on their own page: Mail delivery.

What the mails look like

Every mail to your subscribers carries your logo (or the page name) at the top, your primary colour on the button and your status page's name in the greeting and footer. Below that, small, it says "Sent with Statuswerk"; on Business with white label that goes too.

Unsubscribing from the mail client itself

On top of the link in the body, every subscriber email carries the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and Apple Mail turn those into their own Unsubscribe button next to the sender. One click removes the subscriber straight away, with no confirmation page in between.

This is deliverability rather than convenience: Gmail and Yahoo expect that button on notification mail. Without it, recipients reach for the spam button instead of the unsubscribe button — and that harms delivery of all your notifications, including to the subscribers who want to stay.

Two things worth knowing:

• An unsubscribe through that button looks exactly like any other in your list: the subscriber is gone. There is no intermediate step for you to see.
• The Unsubscribe link in the message body still leads to a confirmation page. Only the mail client's button acts immediately. That is deliberate: preview features and security scanners follow links in mail, and a subscriber removed by a link preview would have no idea why the alerts stopped.

There is nothing to configure. It applies to every status page on every plan.

When emails do not arrive

Some addresses stop accepting mail — the account was deleted, the mailbox is full, someone marked the notification as spam. Our sending provider reports that back to us, and we mark those subscribers in your list as undeliverable.

That has three consequences:

• They receive no further notifications. Continuing to send to a dead address hurts deliverability for all your other subscribers.
• They no longer count against your subscriber quota. You do not pay for dead weight.
• They stay visible in the list, with a reason and a date. You can see what happened instead of someone quietly disappearing.

Undeliverable is not unsubscribed. Someone who unsubscribes disappears from the list. Someone who is undeliverable stays visible — so you can tell your customer why the mail never arrived.

A temporary delay — a full mailbox, a server throttling for a moment — is not a reason for this mark. The provider retries those on its own.

If a subscriber becomes reachable again, they can simply subscribe once more.