Persist before presenting
Important events are stored before they are shown.
Live delivery makes BellRelay immediate, but the durable inbox means a sleeping Mac, lost connection, or missed stream does not erase the event.
All work 
BellRelay
A native Mac app that makes important commerce events hard to miss, and easy to celebrate.
Built independently Product design · native macOS engineering · backend systems · commerce integrations
Overview
A sale should be hard to miss, and easy to celebrate.
BellRelay started from a problem I kept having in my own business. Orders would come through Shopify or Stripe while I was focused on something else, and unless I remembered to keep checking a dashboard, I could discover them a day or two later.
For a small operator, that is not a trivial notification problem. A single large order can cover rent, payroll, software, or the next month of operating expenses. Sometimes it is the moment that keeps the whole business moving.
I wanted those moments out of the dashboard and into the room.
BellRelay turns important commerce events into persistent native Mac alerts, but persistence is only half the idea. The other half is delight. When someone buys something from a business you built, that should feel like something happened.
Not another badge. Not another line in a feed.
You made a sale. That’s amazing. Ring the bell.
Design principles
An alert is not the same thing as attention.
BellRelay is built around a simple distinction: an event happened, an alert was delivered, and a person actually dealt with it are three different states.
That distinction shapes the system.
Delivery is not acknowledgment
Showing an alert does not mean it was handled.
Events can remain active, be snoozed, dismissed, or restored without BellRelay pretending that a transient notification was enough.
Keep each business separate
One workspace can connect multiple businesses, while each keeps its own events, integrations, rules, and inbox state.
The boundaries stay explicit even when the interface brings everything together.
Bring the event to the operator
BellRelay is intentionally not another dashboard to remember to check.
Important events surface as native Mac alerts, while quieter activity remains available from the menu bar.
Technical notes
Under the surface.
BellRelay pairs a native macOS client with a backend designed around durable event state and recoverable delivery.
The system uses Go services, PostgreSQL-backed event and inbox state, resumable live delivery, and integrations with commerce platforms such as Shopify and Stripe.
The Mac app is built natively for the platform rather than as a web dashboard wrapped for desktop.
- Go services with PostgreSQL-backed event and inbox state
- Resumable live delivery and inbox recovery after disconnection
- Native SwiftUI Mac app with persistent alerts and a menu-bar surface
- Shopify, Stripe, and business-scoped custom-event paths
Current status
In active development.
BellRelay is being built toward its first public release.
Current work includes commerce integrations, recovery behavior, native alert presentation, merchant onboarding, and the details required to make important events reliably reach the person running the business.