Get camera alerts on your phone, three ways — Telegram, ntfy or Discord

A camera system that detects a person at your door but keeps the news to itself is a diary, not an alarm. The moment Calyston's AI confirms a person, vehicle or animal, it can push the alert — snapshot included — to your phone.

We don't run a notification cloud, and that's deliberate: nobody's servers sit between your cameras and your pocket. Instead, Calyston speaks three services you may already use. Pick one (or all three — alerts fan out to every channel you configure), open Settings → Push notifications, and you're done in five minutes.

All three are set up from the same card, and each has its own Test button — you'll know it works before you walk away.

Option 1: Telegram — a private bot, made in two minutes

Telegram lets anyone create a personal bot, free, no limits that matter here. Yours will have exactly one subscriber: you.

1. In Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot, give it a name. BotFather replies with a bot token — copy it.
2. Open a chat with your new bot and send it any message (this lets it reply to you).
3. Visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR-TOKEN>/getUpdates in a browser and read the "chat":{"id": ...} number — that's your chat ID.
4. Paste token + chat ID into Settings → Push notifications → Telegram and press Test Telegram.

Alerts arrive as a photo message: the detection snapshot, captioned with the camera, what was seen, the zone and the confidence.

Option 2: ntfy — open source, no account at all

ntfy is the homelab favourite: publish-subscribe push with no signup. Anyone who knows a topic's name can post to it, so the topic is the secret — make it unguessable.

1. Install the ntfy app (iOS/Android) and subscribe to a topic like overwatch-k93x-home — something nobody would guess.
2. Enter the server (https://ntfy.sh, or your own if you self-host ntfy) and that topic in Settings → Push notifications → ntfy.
3. Test ntfy → your phone pings.

Snapshots arrive as attachments. And if "no third party" is why you're here: ntfy's server is open source, runs happily in a container on your own hardware, and Calyston lets you point at any server plus an access token for protected topics. That's push notifications with literally nobody else involved.

Option 3: Discord — if it's already open on every screen you own

If your household (or your business's ops room) already lives in Discord, the shortest path is a webhook into a private channel.

1. In your Discord server: channel ⚙ → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook, copy the webhook URL.
2. Paste it into Settings → Push notifications → Discord, press Test Discord.

Every alert lands in the channel with the snapshot attached — which quietly gives you a scrollable, searchable history of everything your cameras flagged, shared with exactly the people in that channel and no one else.

Alerts you control, not alerts that control you

Push works hand-in-hand with Calyston's per-camera arm/disarm and quiet-hours schedule: disarm the driveway camera while you're gardening, or let the whole system stay quiet during the day and arm itself at night. The recordings and the event feed always keep working — arming only governs what's allowed to buzz your pocket.

Push notifications are part of the AI detection feature set (Pro and up). Community installs still record, detect motion and show everything on the dashboard — the push channels light up when a plan with AI detections is active.

Set up in five minutes, then forget it exists — until the moment it's the most important message on your phone.