Notifkit ships notification infrastructure as MIT-licensed npm library

Notifkit ships as a self-hosted notification layer built on Node.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. Its @notifkit/mcp package lets an agent send a notification, pull delivery logs and diagnose a failed send, work that once meant opening a vendor's dashboard. It posted to Show HN on September 8 with 107 stars.

The tool covers Resend for email, Twilio for SMS, FCM for push, plus webhooks, Slack, Telegram, Discord and WhatsApp.

The README names Novu directly and argues the opposite architecture on three points. It picks a library over a hosted platform, Postgres over MongoDB, and workflows written as TypeScript over a visual editor. Nothing in the self-hosted build gets withheld for a paid tier, since there isn't one.

The repo doesn't say how it holds up at volume. Retry behavior under provider rate limits, webhook delivery guarantees, and whether the Postgres schema scales like a purpose-built queue are all open questions. Those questions matter for a team replacing a hosted service, less for a side project experiment.

MIT licensing and a library-not-platform structure is a bet that developers want to own notification code the way they already own auth code. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether Notifkit's maintainers keep pace with Twilio and FCM's API changes. A self-hosted library has no vendor obligated to do that work for it.