NotifyWA: three years by the numbers

NotifyWA launched in August 2023 on PostgreSQL and its PostGIS geospatial extension, so people could subscribe to emergency warnings for the areas they care about. In May 2024 we moved from PostgreSQL to MongoDB because it was cheaper and scaled more flexibly, and its geospatial queries let us keep matching warnings to locations.

Three years in, this is what the platform has handled:

2,200+ registered users watching close to 2,000 locations across Western Australia
8,700+ emergency incidents tracked through 16,700+ official warning updates
812,000+ personalised alerts matched to the people affected
74% growth in alert volume from 2024 to 2025. The number of people receiving alerts each year went from 240 in 2023 to more than 1,200 in 2026.
273,000 alerts during the 2025–26 bushfire season (October to March), including 75,000 in December 2025 alone
Peak day: 2 February 2026, with more than 11,600 alerts sent in 24 hours. On 13 March 2025, 962 different people were alerted in a single day.
The official warning feed is checked about once a minute, around the clock. That's more than 650,000 checks in the last 15 months.

The platform costs about US$6.40 a month to run. That covers AWS (serverless compute, queues, email, hosting and DNS) and MongoDB Atlas. The serverless design keeps compute inside the free tier, and costs stay low even through the peak of fire season.

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