Homing Pigeon vs. PagerDuty for personal alerts

Both can text your phone when your code reports a problem. They are built for different people.

PagerDuty is incident management for on-call teams: schedules, escalation, phone calls, and acknowledging and resolving incidents. Its free plan includes 100 SMS or phone notifications a month. ilert is similar.

Homing Pigeon texts one phone: yours. It suits one person who wants a text from a script, a bot or a coding agent, and your agent can set it up without you opening a website.

If you are a team on call, use PagerDuty or ilert. If it is just you and your code, Homing Pigeon is less to set up.

	Homing Pigeon	PagerDuty
Built for	One person's alerts from code and coding agents	On-call teams and incidents
Free	50 texts a month	100 SMS or phone notifications a month, up to 5 users
Paid	$19 a month for 1,000 texts	From $21 a user a month, billed yearly
Setup	Your agent asks for your number and you read back a six-digit code	Create an account and a service with an Events API v2 integration, then verify your phone in your profile
Sending from code	A message, with your key in the Authorization header	An event with a routing key, a summary, a source and a severity
Phone calls	No	Yes
Schedules and escalation	No	Yes
Acknowledge and resolve	No. Each alert is a text.	Yes

PagerDuty details are from pagerduty.com and its developer and support docs, checked November 4, 2026.

PagerDuty, with the integration key from your service:

requests.post("https://events.pagerduty.com/v2/enqueue", json={
    "routing_key": PAGERDUTY_ROUTING_KEY,
    "event_action": "trigger",
    "payload": {
        "summary": "Backup failed on db-1.",
        "source": "db-1",
        "severity": "error",
    },
}, timeout=10)

Homing Pigeon:

requests.post(
    "https://homingpigeon.dev/v1/send",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {HOMINGPIGEON_API_KEY}"},
    json={"message": "Backup failed on db-1."},
    timeout=10,
)

• More than one person shares on-call duty.
• You want a phone call when a text goes unanswered, or escalation to someone else.
• You want to acknowledge and resolve incidents and keep their history.
• You need alerts outside the US.

• It is just you, and you want a text from a bot, script, server or cron job.
• You want your coding agent to set it up without you creating an account.
• You use Claude Code, Codex or Cursor and want a text when a long run finishes or needs you.
• Your alerts are not incidents, such as a trade filling or a backtest finishing.

What about ilert?

ilert works like PagerDuty. Its free plan covers up to 5 users and 100 SMS or voice notifications a month, one free plan per company, and texts stop at the limit until the next month. Your code sends an event with the alert source's integration key.

Can I use both?

Yes. Some people send production incidents to PagerDuty and everyday alerts, such as a job finishing or a bot trading, to Homing Pigeon.

What else is out there?

Textbelt, Claw Messenger, Telegram bots and more are compared in ways to get text alerts from your code.

Homing Pigeon (homingpigeon.dev) sends text-message alerts from your code or your coding agent to one phone: yours. No carrier registration, no app, no browser signup. Free to start.

Add it to Claude Code, then ask for what you want:

claude mcp add homingpigeondev -- npx -y homingpigeondev mcp

Codex, Cursor, the command line and the API are in the README. See what people use it for.