Alerts from the terminal

Notifox lets you send SMS or email alerts directly from the terminal. One command. No hassle. Pipe in output or pass a message explicitly.

At its core, Notifox is a hosted alerting service with a tiny CLI on top. You run a command; Notifox handles the delivery.

The simplest possible alert

If you can echo something, you can alert on it.

# stdin becomes the alert body
echo "Hello from the CLI" | notifox send -a my-audience -c sms

# or pass a message explicitly
notifox send -a my-audience -c email -m "Deploy finished successfully"

Where your alerts go

In the Notifox console, you configure audiences, which are named recipients (or aliases) like me, ops or michael.

An audience can have one or more channels configured, such as SMS or email (or both).

When you send an alert to an audience and channel, Notifox delivers it to the destination (your inbox or phone).

Alerts

Inbox

alert@notifox.com
Deploy failed on production
Build exited with code 1. Check the logs.
alert@notifox.com
Cron job completed: nightly backup
Backup finished in 4m 32s. 12.4 GB.
alert@notifox.com
Deploy finished successfully
App v1.4.8 deployed to production.

9:41

Notifox

+1 385 4784 182

Yesterday

Notifox: Cron job completed: nightly backup. 12.4 GB.

Notifox: Database migration finished. Schema v3.

Just now

Notifox: Hello from the CLI

Emitting alerts

Notifox works great as a simple alert emitter. Any time something happens, you can notify yourself or your team.

# job done, tell me
./run-job.sh && echo "Job completed" | notifox send -a ops -c email

# one-off event (feature flag, manual run, whatever)
echo "Feature X enabled in prod" | notifox send -a product -c email

No severity levels, no incidents; just "something happened".

Alerting on failures

This is where Notifox really shines.

# script exits non-zero → alert
./migrate.sh || echo "Migration failed" | notifox send -a oncall -c sms

# pods not running → notify
kubectl get pods --field-selector=status.phase!=Running \
  | notifox send -a infra -c sms

# deploy failed → SMS
./deploy.sh || notifox send -a ops -c sms -m "Deploy failed"

Instead of wiring scripts to Twilio, Slack, or email providers directly, you just pipe the failure into Notifox.

Sending reports & stats

Notifox is not only for bad news. It is also useful for sending summaries and reports.

# log tail → email
tail -n 100 app.log | notifox send -a reports -c email
            
# disk usage → email (cron-friendly)
df -h / | notifox send -a reports -c email

# query result → email
psql $db_url -c "SELECT count(*) FROM users;" \
  | notifox send -a reports -c email

# or capture output in a variable and use -m
BALANCE=$(curl -s https://api.trading.com/v1/balance | jq -r .balance)
notifox send -a reports -c sms -m "Total balance: ${BALANCE}"

# infrastructure changes (drift) → plan in your inbox
terraform plan | notifox send -a infra -c email

Works especially well for cron jobs: you get a human-readable report in your inbox without building reporting infrastructure.

Not a bash person?

Notifox also provides SDKs (Python, Go) so you can emit alerts directly from application code. Below is a Python example using the Notifox SDK.

Alert from a Python app

import notifox

client = notifox.NotifoxClient()  # reads NOTIFOX_API_KEY from env

client.send_alert(
    audience="ops",
    alert="Background job finished successfully",
    channel=notifox.Email
)

Alert when a user signs up (simple web server)

A minimal web app that creates a user and emits an alert when that happens:

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify
import notifox

app = Flask(__name__)
client = notifox.NotifoxClient()  # reads NOTIFOX_API_KEY from env

@app.post("/signup")
def signup():
    username = request.json["username"]

    # Pretend we inserted the user into the database here
    # db.insert_user(username)

    client.send_alert(
        audience="product",
        alert=f"User created: {username}",
        channel=notifox.Email
    )

    return jsonify({"status": "ok"})

This pattern works well for: user signups, payments, background jobs, admin actions. Any time something meaningful happens, you can emit an alert with one line of code.

When someone signs up for Notifox, our team gets alerted the same way. We use it ourselves.

Right for you?

Notifox is great if you:

write scripts, cron jobs, or CI pipelines
want to know when something happens without building log pipelines, alarm rules, or webhooks
prefer one call or a pipe over dashboards and complex incident tooling

Notifox is probably not for you if you:

want full metrics, graphs, or APM
need incident workflows or on-call rotations
like paying $41 per seat/month for alerts

Notifox makes alerting straightforward: no log aggregation, no alarm rules, no webhook config. You send when it matters; we deliver to your inbox or phone.

Get started

1. Download the CLI

curl -fsSL https://notifox.com/install.sh | sh

On Windows? Download the executable from the releases page.

2. Create a Notifox account and API key

Sign up (free), create an audience and an API key in the console, then set NOTIFOX_API_KEY in your environment. You can send your first alert in under a minute.

Get started Docs CLI on GitHub

3. Use promo code `notifoxcli` for free credits.

You can redeem the promo code in the Account tab.

Trying the CLI? We'd love to hear your feedback. Reach out.