Notifications

Every notification Latchkey can send, the four delivery channels, severity tiers, and how to tune them per event type.

The notification preferences matrix — Settings, Notifications: every alert type with per-channel toggles.

Latchkey notifies you when something needs attention: a pipeline breaking repeatedly, a cost spike, your trial or free minutes running out, or a fix becoming ready. Configure everything in Settings, Notifications.

Channels#

channelEmailPer event type; critical and important types default on.

channelSlackTo a channel you connect once with OAuth (setup guide).

channelBrowser pushAfter you grant permission on the Notifications settings tab.

channelWeekly digestLow-urgency informational events roll up into one weekly email.

Everything also lands in the in-app notification bell in the dashboard header, regardless of channel settings. The bell shows your unread count (capped at 99+), and its history panel lets you catch up on everything since you last looked: mark items read one at a time, or mark all read and start fresh.

Severity tiers and defaults#

Event types are grouped into three tiers. Critical and Important types default to email on; Informational types default into the weekly digest. Each type has a cooldown so a noisy pipeline cannot flood you with duplicates.

The cooldown deserves a word on why. The first notification carries all the signal: when a workflow fails ten times in an hour, "Pipeline is broken" told you everything on the first failure, and nine repeats would only train you to ignore the channel. Suppressing repeats inside each type's cooldown window keeps every notification you do receive worth opening.

What can notify you#

Notification	Fires when	Tier
Pipeline is broken	A workflow fails many times in a row	Critical
Security risk detected	The AI flags a security issue in a workflow	Critical
Managed runner blocked	A runner launch was blocked (billing or free-tier state)	Critical
Trial expired	Your free trial has ended	Critical
Scan failed / AI scan runner build failed	A custom-runner scan or image build did not finish	Critical
Unexpected CI spend	A run's cost exceeds 4x your 30-day average	Important
Builds are slowing down	Build duration exceeds 2.5x your 30-day average	Important
Diagnosis ready / Scan ready	An AI diagnosis or runner scan is ready for review	Important
AI scan runner is ready	Your custom runner image finished building	Important
Pipeline health declined	Workspace success rate dropped below 70% in the last 24 hours	Important
Recovery time worsening	Mean time to recovery is 2x worse than the prior two weeks	Important
Free tier running out	You crossed 80%, then 100%, of included runner minutes	Important
Trial ending soon	Three days or less left on your trial	Important
New optimization opportunity	Fresh AI recommendations are available	Informational
Fix was applied	A Latchkey optimization PR was merged	Informational
Optimized workflows ready	A batch of workflow optimizations is ready	Informational
Cost projection rising	Forecasted monthly spend is more than 30% over last month	Informational

A suggested baseline#

The defaults are already sensible: Critical and Important email you, Informational rolls into the digest. If you want a starting posture to tune from, this one works for most teams:

Tier	Suggested routing	Reasoning
Critical	Email (the default), plus Slack	Act-now events: a broken pipeline, a blocked runner launch, an expired trial. They belong where the team looks first.
Important	Email (the default); add Slack for the free-tier and trial warnings	Day-level urgency. The budget warnings are worth putting in front of the whole team before a block happens, not after.
Informational	Weekly digest (the default)	Recommendations and projections read better in one weekly batch than as a trickle of single emails.

Two notes on applying it. Slack routing is admin-only, while every member keeps their own email, push, and digest choices, so the baseline is really two separate decisions: the shared Slack channel and your personal channels. And browser push is best treated as personal: enable it for yourself if you are the person who acts on CI issues first, after granting permission on the Notifications settings tab.

How the weekly digest behaves#

The digest is the informational tier's home. Low-urgency events (a new optimization opportunity, a merged fix, a batch of optimized workflows, a rising cost projection) roll up into one weekly email instead of arriving one at a time. That is also why informational types show a Digest toggle in the settings matrix instead of a per-event email toggle: the choice you are making is whether a type participates in the roll-up.

A suggested habit: treat the digest as a weekly review queue. Nothing in it needs same-day action, but optimization opportunities and cost projections compound if nobody looks at them; a short weekly skim, with Optimization insights open in the next tab, is usually enough.

Tuning and testing#

Each event type has per-channel toggles in the settings matrix; informational types expose a Digest toggle instead of per-event email.
Shortcuts cover the broad changes: master toggles flip a whole tier or a whole channel column at once, Mute all email silences email in one click, Critical only keeps just the page-worthy alerts, and Reset to defaults restores the standard setup.
Admins can send a test notification of any type to verify the wiring end to end.
Slack settings are admin-only; members keep their personal email, push, and digest choices.
Every notification email also carries an unsubscribe link if you prefer to opt out from the inbox side.