Alerting · Pro+
SMS alerts
Email isn't watched at 3 AM. A buzzing phone is — and that's the entire reason SMS exists in your alerting stack.
Why you need it
The loudest channel in StatusPulse, reserved for the moments when nothing else cuts through. Add a phone number to a Person, flip the SMS event toggles, and the next time your API falls over at 03:14, the right human hears about it through the one channel they can't ignore.
- Wake someone when email goes unread. Slack and email fire first; SMS is your last-mile guarantee that a critical Down alert reaches a responder even when they're asleep, off-Slack, or on a flight that just landed.
- Local sender for every country.
US and Canada get a toll-free number, Brazil a long-code,
everywhere else the alphanumeric sender
StatusPulse— higher deliverability, fewer carrier spam blocks, no "+1-something" calls your team ignores. - Hard monthly cap, no surprise bill. Pro includes 100 SMS per month, Business 1,000. Hit the ceiling and remaining sends are skipped and logged — your invoice can't be ambushed by a probe in a retry loop.
- SMS-only event toggles. Start, Change, and Resolution flags live separately from email — so a founder can take SMS only on Start while keeping full email coverage for the rest, no double-paging.
- Per-Person mute for PTO. One toggle blocks every SMS for a Person without disturbing email or their group memberships — the holiday-week setting your on-call rota needs.
Where it pays off
SMS earns its keep when email isn't watched around-the-clock:
- Solo founder or two-person team. One phone, Major-incident Starts only. Three or four messages a month, well inside the Pro quota.
- Primary on-call escalation. Slack and email fire first; SMS goes out on Start to whoever holds the pager that week, so the responder hears it whether they're at their laptop or not.
- Customers monitoring their own critical systems. An enterprise customer subscribes their NOC duty phone to your SMS alerts — they get woken on outages the same way your team does.
- International teams. Your Brazil ops lead gets a local BR long-code instead of an alphanumeric that the carrier silently drops. Deliverability matters more than cleverness.
Not the right tool when: you want two-way replies ("STOP", "ACK") — SMS in StatusPulse is one-way; unsubscribe flows through the same web link as email.
Available on Pro+. Already on StatusPulse? See the full config in Help →
Related
Try SMS alerts in StatusPulse
5 probes, 1 status page, forever. No credit card. US or EU host — you choose.