The Watcher

Never miss what matters to you

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Inspiration

I was tired of missing out on topics I cared about or being way too late to know. Every day I'd jump between Reddit, Twitter, news sites, hunting for AI breakthroughs, sports updates, startup news, market movements. Normal news sites throw everything at you - politics, celebrity gossip, clickbait. I wanted something that would just watch what I care about. That's how TheWatcher was born.

What it does

TheWatcher is like having a personal assistant who never sleeps. You create topics like "Tesla stock," "Manchester United transfers," "AI research papers" - set how often you want updates, and you're done. Our AI Watcher Engine monitors the entire internet and sends smart summaries when something important happens.

No more FOMO, no more endless scrolling. You get ONLY what you asked for. Clean, focused, relevant.

How we built it

Next.js and TypeScript for frontend. Supabase for database and auth. Stripe for payments.

The secret sauce? AWS Lambda and EventBridge Scheduler architecture. Each topic gets its own EventBridge schedule that triggers Lambda functions to fetch updates. No servers running 24/7 - just pure pay-per-execution efficiency.

AWS Lambda Event-Driven Flow:

  • User creates topic → EventBridge schedule created
  • Schedule triggers → Lambda function executes
  • Lambda fetches data → Watcher Engine executes
  • Results stored → User gets notified
  • Topic is Marked InActive or Deleted → Scheduler Is deleted for that topic
  • Topic is unpaused → Scheduler is created for the topic again
  • Lambda sleeps → Zero idle costs

Scales from 1 to 1000s of topics without breaking a sweat.

Challenges we ran into

AWS scheduling was brutal. Designing the Entire Architecutre for best scalability and efficiency, Managing thousands of EventBridge schedules with different intervals while handling failures gracefully.

IAM permissions had me choked - Lambda talking to Supabase, EventBridge invoking Lambda, API managing schedules. Permissions policy, IAM Roles, Users hell.

Credit system complexity - handling subscription plans and credits that reset monthly AND purchased credits that last forever.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Serverless architecture that scales infinitely - EventBridge + Lambda means pay only when topics update
  • Can handle 1000s of concurrent topic updates thanks to Lambda auto-scaling
  • AWS bill makes us smile - pennies per topic update
  • Clean UI with zero corporate vibes
  • Topic monitoring across millions of sources
  • Zero data breaches with Supabase row-level security

What we learned

  • My initial instinct was to create a corn jobs, managing timeouts and all for different intervals to execute Lambda, but on further System Design Ideation, i cam across Event Bridge Scheduler. Which is exactly what i wanted. I learnt about it and its one hell of a piece of service.

  • People will pay to save time. Serverless is the way - why pay for idle servers? EventBridge + Lambda keeps costs minimal.

  • Start with security. Test webhooks religiously.

What's next

Mobile apps with push notifications. Team features for businesses. AI that predicts what's coming next in your topics.

Lambda optimizations - batch processing similar topics in one execution. Redis caching for hot topics. Smarter EventBridge scheduling based on topic activity patterns.

The dream? Make TheWatcher the default way people stay informed.

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