Product-generated automated notifications are not just a technical add-on, they are a critical part of the user experience. Whether you're notifying users about password resets, transaction updates, or new features, it's essential that these messages reach the right user, at the right time, through the right channel, without overwhelming them.
Many engineering teams opt to build an in-house notification infrastructure to retain control, enable deep customization, and ensure security. But what starts as a simple messaging system often balloons into a full-fledged internal product, pulling resources away from your core offering.
The reality is, developing and maintaining a reliable, scalable, and observable notification system is a multi-layered challenge. It’s not just about sending messages, it’s about managing preferences, channel fallbacks, A/B tests, compliance, delivery pipelines, and user experience across web and mobile apps.
In 2025, modern notification infrastructure platforms like SuprSend, are redefining how companies approach this problem. These purpose-built platforms abstract away the operational overhead while giving you control, flexibility, and deep observability. This guide breaks down the technical layers involved in notification infrastructure, why in-house builds break down over time, and what to look for in a modern solution.
Getting notifications right is challenging.
Developing a right notification system for web or mobile applications is a challenging task. It is so much more than just calling a vendor a vendor’s (or channel’s) endpoint to deliver the message. As businesses expand and introduce new features, the task of maintaining a reliable and scalable notification system can become more resource-intensive than initially expected. Developer time is valuable, and dedicating hours to managing notification services, crafting new notifications, making adjustments, experimenting, and handling alerts can significantly divert attention from core business innovation.
Let’s look at the hidden costs that surface over time:
Developmental Layers & Resources Needed From Engineering Teams
Before moving forwards in this build vs buy article, let's understand first what goes inside a robust notification system, so you can understand the dependencies and resources required. There are 9 key technical considerations in notification system development:
1. Integration with Multi-Channel Notification Providers:
To support multi-channel delivery, email, push, SMS, in-app inbox, Slack, WhatsApp, you’ll need:
- API integrations with each channel vendor (e.g. Twilio, SendGrid, Firebase)
- Vendor failover logic and retries
- Message tracking (sent, delivered, opened, failed)
- Monitoring channel-specific downtimes
- Handling vendor-specific payload schemas
You'll also need to maintain backward compatibility with channel updates (e.g. when Apple or Android changes push token formats) and abstract delivery logic to avoid duplicating code.
2. Dynamic Template Management System:
Notification templates aren't static. You’ll need a system that allows:
- Channel-specific templates (e.g. rich push vs. transactional email)
- Placeholder and variable interpolation for personalization
- Support for versioning and rollback
- Multi-language support
- CI/CD pipelines to test and ship template updates
- JSON-based layouts for programmatic customization
Without a dedicated UI and API for this, marketing and product teams will be blocked on engineering.
3. Notification Workflows:
- Notification workflows serve as the foundation for determining who receives which notifications, through which channels, and at what intervals. These workflows have various decision-making processes and state management once an event is triggered, whether it's ensuring high delivery rates, issuing reminders, batching notifications for not bombarding, or simply designing seamless cross-channel communication. If built in-house, implementing such notification workflows requires developers to embed it within the codebase, necessitating ongoing maintenance and slowing down iteration. The more complex the logic, the higher is the maintenance cost.
- Imagine a robust workflow engine accessible through both a visual interface and API, equipped with a comprehensive set of primitives right out of the box. With this, product teams can design and deploy complex workflows without extensive development efforts. Product teams gain full transparency into the inner workings of each notification, empowering them to further optimize workflows effortlessly.
Business logic isn't linear, it’s event-driven and complex. A user’s single action might trigger a cascade of notifications:
- Send push immediately
- If not delivered in 1 hour → send fallback email
- If unopened after 24h → retry or escalate
- Batch similar messages to avoid spam
- Avoid sending more than 3 alerts per day per user
In-house teams often hardcode these workflows, making iteration slow and fragile. A visual workflow builder with triggers, conditions, delays, and branches makes experimentation 10x faster.
4. Ensuring High Availability and Reliability:
- Your notification infrastructure requirements begin here with the goal of delivering notifications promptly and reliably.
- You lay a solid foundation through a message queue & distributed system architecture with redundant components, ensuring that your system remains resilient, even in the face of unexpected failures.
- With load balancers and auto-scaling mechanisms at your disposal, you're well-prepared to handle spikes in traffic efficiently. Critical notifications are given priority over not-so-time-sensitive campaigns, resulting in uninterrupted service.
- Observability, powered by monitoring tools, log analyzers, and automated alerting systems, ensures the health of your system, providing a seamless user experience.
5. A/B Testing, User Preferences, and Analytics:
- To enhance user engagement, you would want continuous improvement, conduct A/B tests to optimize content, timing, and delivery. User engagement soars.
- A flexible preference management system empowers your users, granting them control over their notification experience. Satisfaction levels rise.
- Comprehensive metrics and real-time data analysis, enhanced by data visualization tools, lead to data-driven decisions and heightened user engagement.
6. Fallback Mechanisms Considerations for Redundancies:
- You fortify your infrastructure with redundant components and failover mechanisms, ensuring uninterrupted service, even in the face of adversity.
- Robust alerting and error-handling mechanisms log delivery failures, enabling observability and faster debugging.
- Reliable message queues and retry strategies ensure notifications are delivered seamlessly every time.
7. Seamless User Experience Across Channels and Devices:
- Your work continues with designing responsive, personalized, and dynamic notifications. The result? A consistent, engaging user experience.
- Cross-channel delivery mechanisms reach your users through their preferred communication channels, boosting user satisfaction.
- Intelligent message routing based on user preferences, geo-location, and contextual information enhances user engagement.
- Synchronized notification states and responses across multiple devices and browsers create a seamless and satisfying user experience.
8. Security and Privacy of User Data:
- You would be utilizing industry-standard encryption algorithms and protocols to secure communication channels and protect sensitive data both at rest and in transit. Your users' data is under lock and key.
- Implement access controls, authentication mechanisms, and role-based permissions to ensure that only authorized personnel can access your notification systems.
- Regularly apply security patches and updates to keep vulnerabilities at bay.
- Incorporate robust audit trails, providing the ability to track and investigate any security incidents. Rest easy knowing you can always uncover the truth.
9. Compliance with Industry Regulations and Standards:
- Ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations like SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA.
- Store notifications and user data, aligning with regulatory requirements in different regions.
- Conduct periodic audits and assessments, validating compliance and identifying any potential gaps.
10. Cost Management and Infrastructure Optimization:
- Leveraging caching mechanisms and content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce bandwidth and server costs.
- Employing data compression techniques to minimize storage requirements.
- Monitoring and analyzing resource usage to identify areas of optimization and cost-saving opportunities.
- Implement intelligent channel and vendor routing to save costs.
Building and maintaining a robust in-house notification system demands substantial time and development resources with varying priorities. Refer to the table below for an overview:
Frameworks for Build V/S Buy Decision-Making in Notification Infrastructure
New-age notification platforms like SuprSend and Novu offer plug-and-play infrastructure for product-related notification systems. By leveraging their single notification APIs, businesses gain flexibility and abstraction, eliminating the need to build a notification system from scratch. Simply ‘Buy’ their subscription, integrate the API, and use their ready-made solution for seamless transactional notifications.
We evaluated these new-age platforms with the in-house development of notification systems using these commonly used frameworks.
Feature-Benefit Analysis
When making a build v/s buy decision for transactional notification infrastructure, conducting a cost-benefit analysis can help assess the financial implications and potential advantages of each option. Check out here:
Decided To Go with Build?
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Check out the essential components of a robust notification system, instilling customers’ trust in your product in A complete guide on Notification Service for Modern Applications in 2023
Also you should take care of certain complexities to fully harness the capabilities provided by your in-house notification infrastructure.
Challenges of maintaining and scaling:
Maintaining and scaling an in-house notification system can be a significant challenge, especially as the number of users grows. Here are some of the issues that developers may face:
- Increased complexity: As the system grows, it becomes more complex, with more components, more code, and more dependencies. This can make it harder to build, maintain, debug, and scale.
- Performance issues: As the number of users increases, the system must handle a higher volume of notifications, which can lead to performance issues. Developers may need to constantly monitor performance, optimize the system, and upgrade infrastructure to keep up with demand.
- Observability: A common challenge coming out from the product teams is that they don’t have visibility of their failed notifications to a granular level, which would require the engineering team to develop a comprehensive analytics part of the notification system.
- Auditing and Compliance: Ensuring compliance with data regulations and conducting comprehensive auditing becomes a critical concern as the system scales. Tracking and documenting notification activities for auditing purposes are essential to maintain legal compliance and data integrity. Developing robust auditing mechanisms that capture every interaction can be resource-intensive and complex.
- Developer Fatigue and Knowledge Transfer: The challenges of maintaining and scaling an in-house notification system can contribute to developer burnout, motivation issues, and high-stress situations. Additionally, knowledge transfer and training become vital for continuity when team members leave the organization.
- Cost control: Finally, there is always pressure to control costs, particularly when it comes to infrastructure and operations. Developers must carefully consider the cost implications of different design choices and optimization strategies and balance these against the needs of the business.
Fragmentation Challenges:
Building a notification system in-house can lead to fragmentation across different platforms and devices, resulting in an inconsistent user experience. Here are some ways that fragmentation can occur:
- Platform Diversity: Users engage through web, mobile, or desktop platforms, each with unique technologies, posing a consistency challenge. For instance, push notifications on mobile devices rely on operating system-specific APIs, such as Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) for iOS and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for Android.
- Device Variance: Users adopt diverse devices with distinct screen sizes and resolutions, leading to inconsistent notifications. Moreover, device-specific features, such as Doze mode on Android or Low Power Mode on iOS, can impact notification delivery and require customized handling.
- OS/ Browser Heterogeneity: Users operate different OS like iOS, Android, or Windows, and browsers like Chrome, Safari, etc complicating notification harmonization. For example, iOS imposes strict guidelines for push notifications, requiring careful consideration of factors like notification format, timing, and user consent. In contrast, Android offers greater flexibility but demands diligent monitoring of API changes and compatibility issues.
- Organizational Fragmentation: Inter-team and departmental disparities can result in decentralized notification solutions, causing inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and redundancy. Centralization is essential for a cohesive and strategic notification approach.
The consequences of fragmentation can be severe, including
- Decreased user engagement: If notifications don't work correctly or consistently across all platforms and devices, users may become frustrated and disengage from the application.
- Negative brand perception: A poorly designed notification system can reflect badly on the brand, eroding user trust and loyalty.
- Lack of product adoption: If users don't receive notifications, or receive too many, or find them confusing, they may not adopt new features or use the application to its fullest extent.
Once you can tackle these complexities, then your end-user engagement will soar automatically. Or you can just abstract away these complexities to a third-party notification infrastructure tool that takes care of observability and compliance, too.
Decided To Go with Buy?
Excellent choice!
By choosing third-party notification solutions like SuprSend, you gain access to a range of top-notch features without allocating your valuable resources toward building these systems from scratch. Our platform offers the same powerful notification capabilities utilized by leading companies such as LinkedIn, Airbnb, Amazon, Slack, and many others.
Check out what you saved with SuprSend notification infrastructure: What you get with SuprSend
Our Customers Case-Study - Their Decision of Build v/s Buy
Seeking a Cost Comparison?
Reach out to us, and we'll create a personalized cost comparison chart to help you make an informed decision between building or buying your notification infrastructure. Cost Comparison
Build vs Buy Notification Infrastructure - FAQs
1. What is the build vs buy decision in notification infrastructure?
The build vs buy decision in notification infrastructure refers to whether a company should develop its own in-house system for managing transactional and product notifications or use a third-party solution like SuprSend that offers ready-made APIs and infrastructure. Each approach has trade-offs in terms of cost, scalability, control, and complexity.
2. Why do companies choose to buy notification infrastructure instead of building it?
Companies often choose to buy notification infrastructure because platforms like SuprSend or Braze or Clevertap offer:
- Pre-built APIs for multi-channel notifications (email, SMS, push, etc.)
- Advanced observability, analytics, and compliance tools
- Significantly lower time-to-market
- Reduced developer fatigue and operational complexity
3. What are the challenges of building an in-house notification system?
Some of the major challenges of building your own notification system include:
- Increased engineering complexity over time
- Performance bottlenecks as user base scales
- Lack of granular observability for failed notifications
- Auditing and compliance overhead (e.g. GDPR, SOC2)
- Developer burnout due to ongoing maintenance
- Fragmentation across platforms, devices, and teams
4. What is notification fragmentation and why is it a problem?
Notification fragmentation occurs when the notification experience becomes inconsistent across platforms (e.g., web vs mobile), devices, and operating systems. It leads to:
- Poor user experience
- Missed or failed notifications
- Negative brand perception
- Low feature adoption and engagement
5. How do third-party platforms like SuprSend solve notification fragmentation?
SuprSend solves fragmentation by providing:
- A centralized SuprSend notification API for consistent delivery across all channels
- Built-in support for mobile (APNs, FCM), web, and email protocols
- Customization and delivery logic based on user preferences and device capabilities
- Cross-platform observability to monitor notification failures or delays
6. What are the benefits of buying SuprSend for notification infrastructure?
SuprSend offers:
- Multi-channel support via a single API
- Real-time notification logs and failure insights
- Built-in compliance features
- Faster integration vs building from scratch
- Scalable infrastructure used by industry leaders like LinkedIn, Slack, Airbnb
7. Is building an in-house notification system ever a good idea?
Yes, building your own notification system might be viable if:
- You need highly custom workflows or tight integration with internal systems
- You have a large engineering team with deep expertise in messaging infrastructure
- You're in a regulated industry that requires full ownership over notification data
But even then, the long-term TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and resource overhead should be carefully evaluated.
8. What’s the cost difference between building vs buying notification infrastructure?
The total cost of ownership includes:
- Developer hours (initial + ongoing maintenance)
- Infrastructure costs (servers, databases, failover systems)
- Monitoring, alerting, and observability stack
- Compliance and data protection
Platforms like SuprSend offer cost calculators and custom comparisons to help teams understand ROI.
9. Can SuprSend help with compliance and auditing for notifications?
Yes. SuprSend includes:
- Detailed delivery logs for every notification
- Timestamped user-level event tracking
- GDPR-ready infrastructure with data retention controls
- Support for audit trails for enterprise-grade compliance needs
10. How does SuprSend reduce developer fatigue?
By abstracting the heavy lifting of:
- Notification queue management
- Channel-specific delivery quirks (like FCM/APNs quirks)
- Retry logic and failure handling
- Analytics dashboards for real-time visibility
SuprSend lets engineers focus on building product features, not plumbing infrastructure.
11. Which companies typically choose to buy notification infrastructure?
Fast-growing startups, mid-size SaaS platforms, and even enterprise teams that:
- Want to ship faster without reinventing the wheel
- Have lean product-engineering teams
- Need to meet strict uptime or compliance requirements
- Want full observability into notification delivery
12. How does observability help in a notification system?
Observability helps you:
- Identify which notifications failed and why
- Monitor latency and delivery success across channels
- Pinpoint user-level issues
- Ensure SLA compliance in high-stakes use cases like fintech, healthcare, and logistics
13. Where can I get a personalized cost-benefit comparison between building vs buying?
You can reach out to SuprSend directly for a custom cost comparison. They offer tailored insights based on:
- Your expected notification volume
- Team size and developer capacity
- Current infrastructure setup
- Regulatory and compliance requirements
