How to send push notifications from Claude routines

Routines are great until you realize you have no idea what they're doing. You set one up to triage your bug tracker every weeknight at 2am, close the laptop, go to bed. It runs — in Anthropic's cloud, without you. Next morning you'd have to remember to open claude.ai and read the run. Most days you forget.

So let the routine tell you. Attach TheNotificationApp's MCP connector, add one line to the prompt, and every cloud run ends with a push notification on your iPhone — the actual result, not a dashboard you have to go check.

Quick recap: what a routine is

A routine is a saved Claude Code setup — a prompt, some repos, a set of connectors — that runs on its own on Anthropic's cloud infrastructure. It fires on a schedule (hourly, nightly, weekly), from an API call, or on a GitHub event like a new PR. Because it runs in the cloud, it keeps working with your laptop shut.

That's the whole appeal. It's also the catch: you're not there. The run list shows a green checkmark when a session exits cleanly — but green only means it ran, not that your task worked. The only way to really know is to open the run and read it. A push notification carrying the result skips that trip.

Step 1 — Connect the MCP server (once)

Already added the connector for Claude? You're done with this step — routines reuse the same MCP connectors that are connected on your account. If not, it's a two-minute job: add a custom connector pointing at https://thenotification.app/api/mcp and sign in with Apple. The Claude + MCP setup guide walks through it, and the MCP docs list the exact fields.

Here's the part that matters for routines: when you create one, every connector on your account is included by default. So the notification tool is already sitting there — there's nothing to wire up per routine.

Step 2 — Tell the routine to notify you

A routine runs autonomously with no approval prompts, so anything you want it to do has to live in the prompt. Add a closing instruction. For a nightly bug-triage routine, the tail end might read:

End every run by sending me a push notification titled "Bug triage done," with a one-line summary of what you labeled in the body and a link to the issue tracker.

Claude fills in the title, body, a tap-through link, and an image if it generated one. Put the real outcome in the body — "labeled 7 issues, 2 need a human" beats "done" — because that notification is the only thing you'll see without opening the session.

Step 3 — Run it once to check

Don't wait until 2am to learn it doesn't work. On the routine's detail page, hit Run now. If the connector's wired up, your phone buzzes during the run. If it doesn't, open the session and look — a no-show usually means the connector got removed from that routine, or the prompt never actually told Claude to send one.

It works even on the locked-down default environment

Routines run in a cloud environment with a network allowlist. The default ("Trusted") blocks arbitrary domains — which you'd think means adding thenotification.app to an allowed list. It doesn't. MCP connector traffic routes through Anthropic's own servers, so the notification goes out without touching the environment's network policy. One less thing to configure.

Real talk

A few honest caveats. Routines are in research preview and only on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans with Claude Code on the web — if you're on the free Claude tier, this isn't available to you yet. There's a daily cap on how many runs start per account, and the minimum schedule interval is one hour, so this is for "tell me what happened," not second-by-second monitoring. And since a routine can use every tool from an included connector without asking, keep each routine's connector list trimmed to what it actually needs. On our side, the free tier's 100-notification cap is plenty for a nightly routine; an hourly one will want Pro ($2.99/month for 1,000 a month).

Close the loop on your routines

If you're running routines, you already trust Claude to work while you're away. A notification just means you actually find out it did — and what it found. Connect it once, drop a line in the prompt, hit Run now. Grab a free key here.