Server and uptime alerts with SMS from your own Android number
Published and updated
Email and chat notifications are silent at 3am. A text is not. You need a channel that costs nothing per alert, works when your own infrastructure is the thing that is down, and does not page the whole team for every flap. With textbee the sender is an Android phone holding your SIM, so the message comes from your own number, recipients can reply, and the Pro plan, up to 5,000 messages for $9.99 a month with no per message fee.
How it works
- Keep the sending phone and the textbee call outside the system you monitor: a separate host, a cron job or the monitoring tool itself calling the API.
- When a check fails, send one message with POST /gateway/send-sms to the on-call number: the service, the check, the time and one line of context.
- Deduplicate on the incident, not the check run. Send on state change from up to down and again on recovery, never once per minute while it stays down.
- Let the engineer reply ACK from their phone and read it through the webhook or /gateway/messages to stop escalation to the next person.
Send it
The API key comes from the dashboard and the phone registered on your account does the sending. Recipients are E.164 numbers; the example is fictional.
curl -X POST https://api.textbee.dev/api/v1/gateway/send-sms \
-H "x-api-key: $TEXTBEE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"recipients": ["+12015550123"], "message": "Alert from textbee monitor: api.example.com health check failed at 03:12 UTC. https://status.example.com"}'Message template
Placeholders in double braces are filled per recipient by your code or by the CSV upload in the dashboard. Keep the result under 160 GSM-7 characters so it stays one segment.
Alert from {{ company }}: {{ message }}. {{ actionUrl }}Consent and compliance
Alerts to your own team on numbers they gave you for on-call duty need no marketing consent, but they are still texts to individuals: keep an off switch per person, respect quiet hours for non-urgent severities, and stop when someone leaves the rotation.
Honest limits
One phone sends roughly 10 to 15 messages a minute, so a large blast takes time to drain. That is irrelevant for alerts, which are rare by design, but the gateway phone is itself a device that can lose power or signal. Keep it on a charger with its own connection, and monitor it too.
One phone sends roughly 10 to 15 messages a minute, so a large blast takes time to drain. Carriers can filter bulk patterns on consumer SIMs. Marketing messages still need consent from the recipient under the local rules.
Frequently asked questions
What if the outage takes down the gateway?
Run the phone and the script that calls textbee somewhere the monitored system cannot take with it: a separate network, a small VPS, or the monitoring vendor. The phone only needs power and a signal.
How do I avoid alert storms?
Send on state change only. Track the incident in your monitor or a small state file, text once when it opens and once when it resolves, and escalate to the next person only if nobody acknowledges within a set time.
Can I send alerts from a shell script or cron?
Yes. The send call is one curl command, which is why the sample above is a shell script. Any monitor that can run a webhook or a command can call it.