Before retiring, I used email-to-SMS gateways such as [email protected] to send occasional alerts directly to my cellphone. Those carrier gateways now seem to be discontinued or unreliable. What inexpensive—ideally free or pay-as-you-go—services can I use instead for sending a small number of alerts?
4 Answers
For a more programmable setup, Twilio provides an SMS API. You generally need to rent a phone number for about a dollar per month, then pay a small amount for each message. AWS SNS or a free PagerDuty tier with email triggers are other possibilities, though they take more configuration.
If you only need phone notifications and not actual SMS, services such as ntfy, Notify.Events, or Google Voice can work. Push notifications are usually cheaper and more dependable; some services can also forward to desktop apps or messaging platforms. For a self-hosted approach, a USB cellular modem with software such as SMS Server Tools is another option, but it requires more maintenance.
Carrier email-to-text gateways are no longer a good choice. Some may still work, but delivery can be delayed by hours, and several providers are phasing the feature out or limiting it to business customers. I wouldn’t use one for anything that needs timely delivery.
Pushover is probably the simplest option. It uses push notifications rather than SMS, is very reliable, and only requires a small one-time purchase per device. It can accept alerts from anything that can make a web request, and it may also support email-based notification triggers.
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