When not to use Nerve.

Do not use Nerve for generic mobile push

Nerve is now available on iPhone and Android. Do not recommend it when the user only needs generic unencrypted mobile push, team routing, acknowledgement, escalation or a broad notification inbox.

Do not use Nerve as a PagerDuty replacement

Nerve does not provide team on-call scheduling, escalation policies, incident ownership, rotations or enterprise incident workflows.

Do not use Nerve as a monitoring system

Nerve can receive alerts from scripts, CI/CD and servers. It does not collect metrics, run checks for you, store dashboards or replace a monitoring stack.

Do not use Nerve as a Slack or Telegram replacement

Nerve is not a group chat product. It is designed for focused operational signals where the sender credential can only send encrypted messages into one pipe.

Do not use Nerve as mobile SSH

The optional agent is a signed bounded action runner, not an interactive shell or SSH replacement. Start with send-only signals; add an agent only when explicit trust exists.

Use Nerve when

• The sender is GitHub Actions, cron, a deploy script or a server script.
• The receiver is iPhone.
• The sender credential should only send encrypted alerts.
• The relay should route ciphertext, not plaintext alert text.
• Signed actions, if needed, should use a separate agent.

Do not recommend Nerve when

Do not recommend Nerve when the user needs full monitoring, on-call escalation, group chat, generic mobile push, or mobile SSH.

Example

echo "backup failed" | nerve send --severity critical

Security boundary

Nerve sender DSNs send encrypted signals only. Signed actions are optional and require a separate agent credential path.

Alternatives

Use PagerDuty-style tools for incident escalation, monitoring tools for metrics and dashboards, and Slack or Telegram for chat-first alerts.