Contacting Someone When Alarm goes off

Hello everyone. I am new to the system, so I am trying to wrap my head around everything regarding messages. I come from Smarthtings.

So my question is, let's say my alarm goes off in the middle of the night. What's the best way to go about Notifying someone outside of people who are actually in the house. Say I wanted to contact my father, who lives at another house, and doesnt have the Hubitat app installed, or the Pushover app. Or any other app for that matter. I don't want to rely on the outside person having something installed on there phone, in fear they may delete the app.

I see SMS is no longer. I read a little about Pushover, but I think the app needs to be installed on other phone. Twilio, costs money, and I couldn't get it to work. What are my best options here.

It seems silly to only notify the people in the house, if the intruder is breaking into that house.

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That’s the problem with SMS, someone has to pay for the cost of sending the message, and I believe that’s why Hubitat was unable to continue offering a built-in solution for free.

Would email work? I haven’t tried any of them myself, but there’s at least one or two threads with a working solution for sending an email based on a Hubitat event.

Phone carriers have the ability to receive texts by email:

So you could send an email (which is free) to: your_dads_number@the carrier domain listed on that page

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I might be willing to pay for Twilio... But the pay scale is super confusing... And plus it wouldn't set up right, when I put the codes in, the phone number section just wouldn't pop up.

Email is no good.

Can't IFTTT make phone calls and send text messages? Been awhile since I used it but I seem to remember it doing that.

Hmm.. sounds interesting. I haven't used it in awhile either. I feel like I would of come across someone else saying it though.

You could load it up and take a look. I know the app doesn't have to be installed and HE has support for it.

just so it's clear: sending an email (from Hubitat through an SMTP server like gmail) to a specially formatted email address shows up as a text message to the recipient

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Email to sms relay would do what you want. Just need to know their carrier and how they format the address.

Getting third party apps to work is confusing and not user friendly for a non nerd to make work. Hubitat needs to put it back in and charge for the service. I did wind up using Twilio. It does work consistently well. I think you have to open an account with a minimum of maybe $20. That actually buys a LOT of texts ( If I'm figuring it right, maybe .0126 per message). I could see though how someone with a Hub could burn through a zillion of those if they weren't paying for them.

Hubitat Administrators- please consider putting this functionality back in for a fee.

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The hub protection service should hopefully be released soon, and they have hinted in the past at other value-added services they’ll add in the future.

Support for SMS seems like a reasonable cost to pass on to users that want it as an option, so hopefully it’s on their list.

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I only want to use it to notify someone if my alarm goes off, so I will not even be barely using SMS at all, just like the option of having it in case. So with that $20 you think it would last a long time? There is not monthly charge for it?

Right now I set it up, but I am on the trial, and the pay scale is really confusing.

I looked it up. I paid $20 Oct of 2019, and I still have almost $7 left. No monthly cost I can see. They actually gave me a phone number too for that. I always use a prepaid visa card for stuff like this so you can't get hit with any surprises. No surprises have happened though. Maybe wait just a bit- maybe they will add texts back in for a fee via hubitat. That would be my preference anyway.

I threw this together based of @ogiewon's Pushover driver for SendGrid. It's pretty basic but it gets the job done if you only need to send <100 messages a day and don't want to run your own SMTP server, and don't have access to an app to do push notifications. You should also be able to email your SMS address with it, but I haven't tested that.

https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-sendgrid-email-notification-plugin

I've been using IFTTT for this and it works great. It calls a phone number and delivers a defined message.

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IFTTT has become a lot more reliable these days but remember, it's another cloud service. So, if it's down, no one gets notified. With something like an alarm, you have to decide what your risk tolerance is.

For their free plan SendGrid is showing:

Free

Try it out! Send 40,000 emails for 30 days, then 100/day forever.]

I have multiple sirens, get push notifications and have HSM flash specific lights in the house for redundancy.

@brianwilson ... thanks for writing this Groovy. Do I load this into my HE as a driver?

I'm in the UK, and tried all sorts after smartthings pulled the plug on sms messaging alerts.

In the end, I stuck with an old android running tasker. Phone has a pay as you go sim (1p mobile) which has an auto topup of 10 quid every 3 months. Webcore Piston triggers custom sms messages sent from the phone to a number of people, depending on the state of a few virtual switches.

I had a "Security contacts" panel on an actiontiles dashboard, allowing for individual contacts to be enabled/ disabled easily.

Also has presence logic, so the sent sms includes a bit of info or automatically chooses who to contact depending if we're near home or not.

It's my next thing to port over, I've recently changed to hubitat.