nudge.sh

What Is It

nudge.sh is a command-line SMS notification service for developers. When long-running tasks such as deployments, database migrations, builds, or training jobs finish, it can send an SMS to a verified phone number with a single curl/HTTP POST request. It is not positioned as a full monitoring platform, but rather as a lightweight “tell me when the job is done” tool.

Core Features and Integrations

Its biggest selling point is that it requires no SDK, no config file, and no daemon: if you can use curl, you can use it. The API is a POST request to https://nudge.sh/{token}, with fields such as status, exit_code, duration, output, message, and label. Log output can be up to 50KB and viewed via a link in the SMS. Use cases include Bash/Zsh, cron, CI/CD, Makefile, GitHub Actions, and AI agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf; it also supports MCP Server. The documentation covers Getting Started, API Reference, Shell & Cron, CI/CD, and AI Agents & MCP, with clear examples and a very low barrier to entry.

Pricing and Limits

The free quota page lists 20 messages/month, while the Terms of Service further specify 20 messages/month for the United States and Canada, and 10 messages/month internationally. Paid plans are one-time credit packs: $9/100 messages, $25/500 messages, and $49/2000 messages. Credits never expire, payments are processed in USD via Stripe, and purchases are non-refundable. The default rate limit is 60 requests per hour and 200 requests per day, so it is better suited to critical task notifications for individuals or small teams than to high-frequency alerting systems.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

The advantages are extremely simple integration, transparent pricing, non-expiring credits, and support for including exit codes and runtime duration. It is especially suitable for developers, DevOps engineers, data engineers, and users running ML training jobs. The downsides are that SMS delivery depends on third-party carriers and Twilio, so delivery is not guaranteed; logs are uploaded to the service, and although the documentation states they are encrypted at rest and automatically deleted, you should not include passwords, keys, or other people’s PII. We did not see information about open source availability, self-hosting, or an SLA.

Access from China

The crawled content did not provide information about mainland China access, SMS coverage, or payment availability, so this remains unknown. If using it from a domestic China environment, it is recommended to first test SMS deliverability and Stripe payment. Alternatives to consider include WeCom/WeChat Work or DingTalk bots, ServerChan, ntfy, Telegram Bot, Pushover, or Slack/Discord Webhook.