Telegram

A Telegram bot is free, takes ten minutes to make, and is the easiest way to run a site from a phone. Local Lab sends nine kinds of alert (a new user, listing, review, lead, featured purchase, contact message, lead subscription, approved lead, claim) and answers twelve commands: stats, pending, sales, cities, and approve or reject a listing, review or lead by replying to the message. Approve and delete buttons sit under each alert.

Job Lab's bot has sixteen commands and seventeen alert events, each with its own switch: applications, new jobs, sign-ups, feed runs and errors, flagged listings with Approve and Reject buttons, paid ad orders with an Approve button, AI budget warnings, a daily digest, security alerts and admin logins. It only answers the one chat you set, and the webhook checks a secret.

In Launch Lab, Telegram is a smoke alarm: the nightly backup script messages you if a backup fails, and that is all. Sales and sign-ups arrive by email.

Worth knowing#

• Optional and free in all three. Local Lab and Job Lab take the bot token and chat id in the admin (Job Lab encrypts it); Launch Lab reads it from the backup script's own settings file on the server.

• Local Lab has a daily summary setting that is only sent when you ask for it.