Pushferry vs. SimGate: Which SMS Gateway Fits Your Use Case?

2026-09-06

SimGate is the tool most likely to come up in the same breath as Pushferry, because it starts from the same unusual premise: instead of routing SMS through Twilio or a similar aggregator, you keep a real Android phone with a real SIM card, and that phone becomes your gateway. No per-message billing from a third party, no message log sitting in someone else's cloud by default. Beyond that starting point, though, the two products are built for genuinely different jobs, and it's worth being precise about where they overlap and where they don't.

The shared idea

Both products reject the idea that sending or receiving a text message should mean paying a fraction of a cent to a carrier-aggregator every time. Both keep the SIM physically with the user rather than shipping it off to a data center the way some SIM-hosting services do. And both show up in the same "Twilio alternative" conversation for the same reason: a phone you already own is cheaper and more private than renting number infrastructure from someone else.

Where they diverge: sending vs. forwarding

SimGate positions itself, in its own words, as a way to "send SMS from your own phone via API." The core interaction is a developer calling SimGate's API to fire off a message through their connected Android phone, with webhooks available to push inbound messages to a server endpoint they control, plus some reply-automation rules for matching and auto-responding to incoming texts. Its integrations page is built entirely around that developer audience — n8n, Make, Zapier, Home Assistant, and raw code samples in Python, Node.js, PHP, and curl. As of when this was checked, there's no built-in Slack or Discord destination listed; getting a message into Slack means routing it through Zapier or a similar automation tool as a middle step, or writing that logic yourself against the webhook.

Pushferry starts from the opposite direction. The core interaction is forwarding — an incoming SMS or app notification on the phone gets routed straight to Slack, Discord, email, a webhook, or a REST API, with those first four built in natively rather than requiring a separate automation tool to bridge the gap. A webhook and REST API are there too, for anyone who wants to build custom logic on top, the same way SimGate's are — but they're the option for people who want more, not the only door in.

Pricing tells the same story

SimGate's tiers scale on two axes at once: connected devices and messages per month. The free plan allows one device and 250 SMS a month; Starter (€7.49/month) allows two devices and 1,200 messages; Pro (€14.99/month) allows five devices and 5,000 messages; Scale (€39/month) allows unlimited devices and 15,000 messages. Go over the monthly message allowance on a given tier and it's time to upgrade, even if the device count would otherwise be fine.

Pushferry's tiers (Free, Solo, Team, Business, at $0/$9/$29/$79) scale on a single axis: how many phones are connected. Message volume doesn't factor in at all — a phone forwarding ten messages a day and one forwarding a thousand cost exactly the same. That's a real, checkable difference for anyone estimating cost against expected traffic rather than device count alone.

Picking between them

If the job is building an outbound sending capability into a product — a booking app that needs to text customers, an internal tool that needs to fire off SMS alerts through code — SimGate's API-first design is the more direct fit; that's the problem it was built to solve. If the job is taking messages that are already landing on a phone (2FA codes, a shared business line, notifications from an app with no API of its own) and getting them to people through tools the team already uses, without standing up a Zapier scenario or writing a webhook handler first, Pushferry's forwarding-first model does that with less setup.

Neither of these facts is a knock on the other product — they're solving adjacent but different problems. It's worth checking simgate.app directly for current pricing and features before deciding, since both products change over time.