SMS vs email — when each makes sense
Email is free and gets every alert. SMS is part of Bottle Hunt Pro and lands first. Here's how to think about which you actually need.
The short version
Email is free for everyone. Drops, lotteries, rebates, ghost drops, and a Sunday digest all fire over email. Nothing here is gated behind a paywall.
SMS is part of Bottle Hunt Pro. $5.99/mo or $49/yr. The text lands first — usually a few seconds before the email — and it respects a quiet-hours window so a 2am drop doesn't wake you.
For most people, email is enough. Pro pays off if you're hunting allocated bottles where the difference between knowing at 8:14am and knowing at 8:16am can decide whether the bottle is on the shelf when you walk in.
What "priority delivery" actually means
When a drop fires, our backend does two things in parallel:
- For Pro subscribers, it sends an SMS via Twilio.
- For everyone, it queues an email via Resend.
The SMS path is shorter — fewer hops, no inbox-side filtering, no delivery delay from your mail server. In practice, Pro subscribers get a phone notification anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds before the email shows up.
Is that worth $5.99? It is if you're driving 45 minutes to a store and you'd rather not get there to find an empty shelf. It probably isn't if you're hunting from home and a fast email is all you need.
Quiet hours
SMS-only feature. You set a window — default 10pm to 7am ET — and any SMS that fires inside the window waits until the window ends. Email always sends live; we don't queue email.
This matters because the FWGS Whiskey Release page sometimes drops new entries at 3am. If you're a paying subscriber, you don't want the cost of waking up for every late-night release.
What you don't get with SMS
- Discord, Slack, Telegram. None of those.
- Ghost-drop confidence callouts. Email shows "we think this is a ghost drop, medium confidence." SMS gets the headline only.
- Unsubscribe by clicking. SMS opt-out is reply STOP. CAN-SPAM doesn't cover SMS — A2P 10DLC does.
How to upgrade or downgrade
Open /settings/billing (you'll need to be signed in). Click Manage subscription to open Stripe's customer portal. You can switch monthly ↔ annual, update your card, or cancel. Cancellations stop future renewals but don't claw back the current period.
If you've never paid, the See Pro plans button on the same page leads to the upgrade flow.
A note on phone verification
Pro doesn't unlock SMS until you verify a phone number. We text a 6-digit code, you type it back, and we save the verified number. After that, SMS alerts fire on whatever criteria you've enabled in /settings/alerts.
If you want to swap numbers later, the same page has a Change number button. Removing the number turns SMS off automatically.
Where to point alerts
Most subscribers wire SMS to specific bottles or specific stores. Browse the products list to favorite the bottles you're hunting, or open the drops feed to see what's been landing across PA so you know what's worth a Pro alert in the first place.