textbee Android SMS gateway, $3.6K MRR: open-source messaging

textbee turns an Android phone into an SMS gateway with API, dashboard, and automation integrations. Its $3.6K MRR is verified through the payment provider's API by TrustMRR (Polar), as of September 30, 2026.

What it actually sells

textbee turns an Android phone into an SMS gateway. Developers, startups, small businesses, nonprofits, and hobbyists use textbee to send OTPs, notifications, reminders, and alerts from their own apps and automations.

The product sends and receives SMS through an Android phone and REST API. It also provides a dashboard, reusable templates with dynamic variables, webhooks, analytics, scheduling, and multi-device support.

How it charges

textbee offers a free SMS API tier: 300 messages a month, no credit card. The product's price could not be identified on the pages we read.

Month by month

Monthly revenue as read from the payment provider by TrustMRR, in US dollars, as of September 30, 2026.

Month	Revenue (USD)
2025-10	$1,234
2025-11	$1,449
2025-12	$2,002
2026-01	$1,137
2026-02	$1,767
2026-03	$1,720
2026-04	$2,192
2026-05	$1,988
2026-06	$2,391
2026-07	$3,420
2026-08	$3,019
2026-09	$3,894

Where customers come from

The pages identify developers, startups, small businesses, nonprofits, and hobbyists as users. They also provide API documentation and developer guides.

textbee lists integrations with n8n, Zapier, Make, and MCP-enabled AI agents. The pages point to a Discord community and a public changelog for releases.

What stands out

The Android app, API, and dashboard are all public. The site says the whole stack is on GitHub and can be audited or self-hosted.

The pages claim 98% cost savings versus traditional SMS gateways, average setup time of 3 min, and more than one million messages sent per month. The site also states that textbee is trusted by 30,000+ developers worldwide.

From the official site

Developers, small businesses, nonprofits, and hobbyists use textbee to send OTPs, notifications, reminders, and alerts from their own apps and automations

Reusable templates with dynamic variables so your team ships consistent messages faster.

Excerpts from the official website, fetched October 1, 2026.

Where it sits in the data

textbee's $3.6K MRR is higher than 87% of the 5,602 projects with payment-verified revenue in our dataset; the median across them is $150. Within the “Dev Tools” category (717 projects) it is higher than 90% (category median $100). Snapshot: 2026-09-02 to 2026-09-30. The dataset only covers founders who chose to publish their numbers, so it leans toward businesses that work; use it for scale, not as an average.

Currency

All figures are in US dollars as published. A rough yuan or euro conversion is not applied here because prices, taxes and acquisition costs differ by country.

Could you build something like this?

My view is that this needs real work. The buyer is a developer or a small business team that needs SMS inside an app or automation, with Android devices available as the messaging layer.

Distribution could come from developer documentation, automation-platform integrations, open-source repositories, and community channels. The hard parts are reliable SMS delivery, inbound-message handling, device management, integrations, support load, security, and compliance.

Verdict: Needs real work.

One thing to take from it

textbee combines an Android SMS gateway, programmable API, reusable templates, and automation integrations in one product shape. Its public software stack, self-hosting option, documentation, and community channels are visible parts of the offer.

Sources

textbee official website, fetched October 1, 2026
textbee pricing page, fetched October 1, 2026
textbee about page, fetched October 1, 2026
TrustMRR: revenue verified through the payment provider's API by TrustMRR (Polar), as of September 30, 2026

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure