An email for every reply can be annoying. The extension I developed embeds an In-App Inbox inside HackerNews (If you've used Reddit, you know). So, everything stays inside HackerNews itself. No push notifications or emails.
That's nice :) In my case, notification (or an indicator atleast) help me save a lot of time. This is especially when I'm serious about knowing the latest updates on something. If it's something less critical, I'd simply snooze them!
Nice to hear your perspective. Just asking, You wouldn't use it even if it's just a badge (or an indication), and nothing intrusive like a push, or a popup?
For a developer, it might look "easier" because literally anything could be built by coding if there is no limit on the time and money they can spend.
But for a company, this means more to them. Of course, they can build anything but there is something called "opportunity cost". A CPO or a CTO or the leadership thinks differently compared to a software developer. The decision is between "whether we should build this feature and add one more potential point of failure for or just buy it and let the vendor worry about it". And this time and effort (that could exponentially grow as the product scale) could be used to build another core product feature that will add direct value to our users.
Most of the time, the "buy" decision is less riskier and economical (in the long run), unless you are a tech giant like Amazon or Google where they might build everything in-house or just acquire the vendor's product and make it their own.
As you might already know, Heroku is stopping their free tier next month. Many developers were using Heroku to host their side projects, and to deploy branches for PR review.
I tried to make a list of alternatives with a free tier. Please feel free to contribute to the repo through PRs.
Oops, I need to edit manifest.json. Well, there is no email. It just shows notifies you via the bell embdedded in your Hacker News header. No push or anything intrusive :)
Btw, this extension doesn't use any private information such as cookies or email. It just uses the public HN username to track replies posted on your threads.
Engagespot is an API that I'm building and I just used it to build this free extension for the HN community :)