Orbit web apps
Orbit web apps
Plan a global send both ways — one blast or one per timezone — and see who gets it at 3am before it ships. Runs entirely in your browser.
Reading as 9:00am · 09:00. Accepts 9am, 21:00, noon.
The one moment the send goes out. Everyone else receives it relative to this.
Offsets are standard-time baselines. Zones that observe daylight saving shift by an hour for part of the year, so treat a clock time as indicative until you confirm it against the send date.
One blast or one per timezone
A single blast is one send and one report row — simple to run, but it reaches everyone at a different local time, and across a global list that means someone opens their phone to it at 3am. A per-timezone send hits the same local time everywhere, which is optimal for each recipient, at the cost of a staggered schedule that runs across most of a day and splits into one send per offset. Tag the sends so the split shows up in reporting rather than getting lost.
Fires once, at 9:00am in US Eastern. Here is the local time each region opens it at.
2 of 7 regions receive it outside waking hours.
US Pacific
UTC-8
6:00am
Early
US Easternanchor
UTC-5
9:00am
Daytime
UK & Ireland
UTC
2:00pm
Daytime
Central Europe
UTC+1
3:00pm
Daytime
India
UTC+5:30
7:30pm
Evening
Singapore & Malaysia
UTC+8
10:00pm
Late — off-hours
Eastern Australia
UTC+10 · next day
12:00am
Asleep — off-hours
Send time is a decision that only exists once your list crosses a border. On a single-country list you send at 9am and you are done. On a global list, 9am is a question — 9am where? — and the answer determines whether half your audience gets a push notification while they are asleep. There are exactly two ways to answer it, and each has a cost you can see in advance.
The simplest send is one instant: you press go, the message leaves, and everyone receives it at the same moment in absolute time — which is a different moment on each recipient's clock. If you fire a blast at 9am New York time, London gets it at 2pm, Sydney gets it at midnight, and Auckland opens it at 2am. Nobody chose those times; they fell out of the geometry.
The appeal is real: one send, one row in the report, one thing to schedule and monitor. For a list clustered in one or two adjacent timezones, a blast is the right call — the spread is an hour or two and nothing lands in the dead of night. The tool above exists to tell you when that stops being true, by naming the regions that receive your blast while they are asleep.
The alternative is to stop thinking about one instant and start thinking about one local time. If you want everyone to receive the send at 9am their time, you fire a separate send in each timezone — 9am in Sydney first, then rolling west, until 9am finally arrives in Hawaii most of a day later. Every recipient gets the send at the same civilised local hour. The cost is operational: your schedule now runs across eighteen or more hours of UTC and splits into one send per offset.
This is the mode most lifecycle platforms call send-time optimisation, and it is genuinely better for engagement in most cases — but it is not free. A staggered send is harder to monitor, harder to hotfix once it has started rolling, and it interacts awkwardly with any content that references a shared moment (a sale that ends at midnight, a live event). The planner above shows the full UTC schedule so you can see exactly how long the tail runs before you commit to it.
The failure mode that survives into production is not choosing the wrong mode — it is choosing a blast without checking who is asleep when it fires. A push notification at 3am is worse than no notification: it wakes people, it trains them to disable notifications, and on some platforms an ignored small-hours push depresses the deliverability of the next one.
The fix is not complicated. Before any global blast, list the local receive time in every region you cover and look for anything between midnight and 6am. If the list is short, shift the anchor time until the worst case moves into daylight. If you cannot find an anchor that keeps everyone awake — which happens the moment your list truly spans the globe — that is the signal to switch to a per-timezone send, because no single instant can be daytime everywhere.
The offsets in this planner are standard-time baselines: real, defensible, and correct for winter. They are indicative rather than exact because roughly half the zones here observe daylight saving, which shifts them by an hour for part of the year — and the transition dates differ by country, so there are short windows where the gap between two zones is an hour off its usual value.
For planning the shape of a send — is a blast viable, how long does the per-timezone tail run — standard offsets are the right altitude and the answer does not change. For a send scheduled to the exact minute on a known date, confirm the live offset for that date, because a send you planned in January to land at 9am can land at 8am in June. This is not a flaw in the arithmetic; it is a property of the clocks, and the only defence is to check close to the send.
There is no universal best time to send, and any tool that claims one is selling you someone else's audience. A B2B lifecycle email lands best mid-morning on a workday; a consumer app's re-engagement push does better in the evening lull; a weekend digest wants Saturday morning. The right time is a property of your audience and your message, measured on your own opens and clicks, not inherited from a blog post.
What this planner fixes is the mechanical layer underneath that judgement: once you have decided the local time that suits your message, it shows you the two ways to deliver it across timezones and the cost of each. The strategy is yours; the geometry is what the tool removes from your plate.
Built into Orbit
Orbit's send-calendar and Braze tooling can audit an existing schedule for off-hours sends across your live audience and lay out a per-timezone rollout. Claude can check a planned send against the timezones your list actually spans and flag the ones that land while people are asleep.
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