How to get notified when products ship updates

Checking changelogs by hand doesn't scale past two or three products. This guide covers every way to flip that around — the update comes to you: a Slack or Discord message when something ships, an email digest on your schedule, a feed in your reader, or a signed webhook into your own systems.

The options form a ladder from zero-setup to fully programmable. Most of the Index-powered ones share one primitive: follow the orgs and products you care about (a free account), and every channel below delivers that same follow list.

What the publisher already offers

Before adding anything, check the two native options:

• GitHub's "Watch → Custom → Releases" on a repo emails you (or notifies in-app) on every tagged release. Solid for libraries; useless for hosted products whose updates never get a tag.
• The vendor's own newsletter or in-app "what's new" panel. Coverage is whatever marketing decides to send, on their schedule.

Both are per-product and per-channel. Everything below gives you one subscription across your whole stack.

RSS: the quiet default

If you already live in a feed reader, subscribe to feeds and you're done — no account needed. Every Releases Index org, source, and collection page serves Atom by appending .atom to its URL (releases.sh/anthropic.atom), including changelogs that publish no feed of their own. The RSS guide covers this end to end.

If you'd rather have one feed than many: sign in, follow your orgs, and generate a personal feed token on Notifications — a private Atom URL of everything you follow, updated as your follows change.

RSS is pull, not push: your reader decides when to check. For "tell me the moment it ships", keep going.

Slack notifications

The most common ask — "post new releases to our team channel" — takes two steps and no app install:

1. Create a Slack incoming webhook for the channel.
2. On Notifications, pick Slack in the Slack & Discord section, paste the URL, and connect.

Each release you follow arrives as a compact message: linked title, short summary, org avatar, and date. There's a Test button to confirm the wiring. Full details, including why the webhook URL must stay secret: Send releases to Slack.

Discord notifications

Same two-step setup as Slack — no bot to install:

1. Create a Discord incoming webhook for the channel.
2. On Notifications, pick Discord in the Slack & Discord section, paste the URL, and connect.

Each release you follow arrives as a compact embed: linked title, short summary, org avatar, and date. There's a Test button to confirm the wiring. Full details, including why the webhook URL must stay secret: Send releases to Discord.

The Notifications page holds one connection for everything you follow, so pick Slack or Discord there. To post one organization's releases to another channel, add an org webhook with the Slack or Discord format on Webhooks & API.

Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, and other chat tools still use an RSS bot on a .atom URL, or a signed webhook plus a small relay.

Email digest

For a rollup instead of a stream: turn on the release digest on Notifications and pick daily or weekly. You get one email summarizing what shipped across everything you follow — the right cadence when you want awareness, not interruptions.

Webhooks, for your own systems

When the destination is your code — an internal tool, a database, a bot you're building — subscribe directly. Each new release you've scoped to arrives as a signed POST with a release.created payload:

curl -X POST https://api.releases.sh/v1/me/webhooks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RELEASES_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"scope":"follows","url":"https://hooks.example.com/my-follows"}'

Subscriptions come in two scopes — one URL for everything you follow, or per-org with filters (sourceSlug, productSlug, releaseType) — with HMAC signatures, retries, delivery logs, and a test endpoint. The fastest path for one org is Add webhook in that organization's ⋯ menu, which opens Webhooks & API already scoped to it. See the webhooks docs for the contract.

For agents

An agent usually shouldn't sit on a push channel — it should check on demand. Add the MCP server and "what changed in my stack this week?" becomes a tool call:

claude mcp add --transport http releases https://agents.releases.sh/mcp

For a live terminal view, the CLI can follow the stream directly: releases tail -f polls for new releases as they land. And a follows-scoped webhook works as an agent trigger too — new release in, agent run out.

Which one should I use?

FAQ

How fast are the notifications?

Push channels (Slack, Discord, webhooks) fire when a release is indexed, which follows the source's polling schedule — typically within a few hours of the publisher posting, often much sooner for active sources. RSS adds your reader's own refresh interval on top. The digest batches to its cadence by design.

Can I cut the noise down?

Several dials: follow specific products instead of whole orgs, subscribe to a single source's feed instead of the org's, or set releaseType: "feature" on a webhook to skip rollup-style entries like routine version bumps.

Do I need an account?

Only for the follow-based channels (Slack, Discord, digest, personal feed, webhooks). Public .atom, .json, and .md feeds and the MCP server's read tools work with no account at all.

What if a product I want isn't indexed?

Submit it, or if it's your product, get listed. Once a source is in the index, every channel on this page works for it — including changelogs that publish no feed or API of their own.

Can one webhook feed multiple channels?

Yes — that's the relay pattern. One follows-scoped webhook into a small worker or automation platform can fan out to Discord, Teams, a database, and a dashboard at once, with your own formatting per destination.