Port22 Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

Port22 lets you drive coding agents running on your Mac from your iPhone. It attaches to a Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode session already open in your terminal, streams the transcript to your phone, and lets you approve prompts remotely. Best for developers running long agent tasks. Price: free, or $19.99 a year. Rating: 7.5/10.

What is Port22?

Port22 solves a problem that only appeared in the last couple of years. You start a coding agent on a long task, walk away, and twenty minutes later it is sitting there waiting for you to approve a file write. The task did not fail. It just stopped, and you are not at your desk.

The product is two pieces: a Mac agent you download as a signed .dmg, and an iOS app. The Mac agent watches terminal sessions you point it at. The phone app shows which agents are working, which are stuck, and what they are doing right now, token by token. When an agent needs approval a push notification lands, you open it and tap the option it actually offered rather than guessing which keystroke to send.

It launched on Product Hunt on 14 August 2026, built by Harsha Chaganti. One note for anyone who saw an earlier version: this product was previously a waitlist with a “coming soon” iOS app. It has now shipped, with a downloadable Mac binary notarised for both Apple Silicon and Intel, and a published price.

What are Port22’s key features?

It attaches, it does not replace

This is the design decision that matters most. Port22 does not start an agent for you and it does not fork your session. It attaches to whatever is already open in your terminal, so your environment, your shell history and your working directory are untouched. Supported agents are Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, with OpenClaw and Hermes listed as coming soon.

Live transcript streaming

You read every token as the agent thinks, edits and runs, streamed to the phone rather than summarised. For debugging an agent that is going off the rails, seeing the actual output beats seeing a status badge.

Approve from the lock screen

A push notification arrives the moment an agent finishes or needs a decision. The app shows the real options the agent presented and you tap one. There is also a live count in the Dynamic Island and the full session roster on the lock screen, so you can check status without opening the app at all.

Pairing with no account

There is no Port22 login. Sign in to the same Apple ID on both devices and the Mac and phone find each other over iCloud. If you would rather not use iCloud, for instance on a work Mac with a different Apple ID, a six character code shown on the Mac pairs them directly over the same Wi-Fi. Fewer credentials is the right answer for a tool that sits between your phone and your source code.

LAN first, encrypted relay second

At your desk it connects over the local network. Away from it, an end-to-end encrypted relay carries the same live session over cellular, and the switch is automatic. Port22 states that payloads are encrypted between your Mac and your phone and that the relay forwards ciphertext without holding the keys. For a product whose entire job is piping source code to a phone over someone else’s infrastructure, that architecture is the minimum bar, and Port22 clears it.

How much does Port22 cost?

Free covers one Mac and two concurrent sessions, and the company is explicit that this is the whole app rather than a trial. You get replying, approving, the encrypted relay on or off your network, and push notifications, with no account and no card.

Unlimited removes both caps for $19.99 a year, described on the page as a founding price that is locked in, and you upgrade inside the app. That buys unlimited paired Macs and unlimited concurrent sessions.

At $20 a year this is priced like a utility rather than a developer tool, which is the correct instinct. For comparison, the agents Port22 controls cost considerably more: Claude Code comes with Claude Pro at $17 a month billed annually, and Cursor is $20 a month. Port22 costs less per year than either costs per month. The honest read is that the free tier is generous enough that many people will never pay, and the paid tier exists for developers running fleets.

What are the real limits?

Three, and the site is upfront about two of them.

First, the terminal list. Port22 works in open-source terminals: Ghostty, kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, tmux and Terminal.app. It explicitly does not work in Warp, and it does not work in an IDE’s built-in terminal. That second exclusion is the significant one, because running Claude Code in the VS Code or Cursor integrated terminal is an extremely common setup. If that is how you work, Port22 does not fit without changing your habits.

Second, the platform requirements are a Mac and an iPhone. There is no Android app and no Linux agent, so a developer on a Linux workstation or an Android phone is out entirely.

Third, and this one is not flagged on the site: the $19.99 is a founding price. “Locked in” suggests existing buyers keep it, but new buyers later should expect to pay more, and there is no published standard price to anchor against.

The two-session cap on the free tier also deserves a note. If you routinely run three or four agents in parallel, which is increasingly normal, you hit the ceiling quickly. That is clearly deliberate and $19.99 is a fair ask, but it means the free tier is a real product for light users rather than for the power users the product is aimed at.

What does a day with Port22 actually look like?

The setup is three steps and one Apple ID. Download the Mac agent, run it, and point it at the terminal sessions you care about. Open the iOS app while signed into the same Apple ID and the two find each other with no QR code and no login. Port22 claims sub-second pairing, and there is no account to create on either end.

From there the loop is simple. You kick off a refactor in Claude Code, close the laptop lid or walk to lunch, and the phone shows a live count of active agents in the Dynamic Island. When the agent hits a decision point, a push arrives. You open it, read the last chunk of transcript to see why it is asking, tap the option you want, and the agent carries on. If it finished instead, the notification says so and you can read the summary without opening anything.

The value shows up specifically in dead time. A twenty-minute agent run that stalls at minute three on an approval prompt wastes seventeen minutes if you are away from the desk. Port22 turns that into a ten-second interruption from wherever you are. For anyone running several agents at once, the roster view is the other half of the benefit: one screen showing which agents are working and which are blocked, rather than cycling through terminal tabs.

Who is Port22 best for?

Use Port22 if you run long agent tasks and leave your desk while they work. Use it if you have ever come back to find an agent idle for half an hour waiting on a yes or no. Use it if you already work in Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty or tmux, since the integration is zero-configuration for you. Use it if you run several agents at once and want one roster showing which are working and which are blocked.

Skip Port22 if you run your agent inside VS Code, Cursor or another IDE’s terminal, because it will not attach. Skip it if you are on Warp. Skip it if you do not have both a Mac and an iPhone. And skip it if you never leave your desk mid-task, because at that point you are solving a problem you do not have.

Best Port22 alternatives

Omnara is the open source alternative to hosted managed agents, with durable execution, approvals and streaming built in. It is model agnostic and self-hostable, which suits teams that want to own the infrastructure, but it is a platform to run rather than an app to install.

Claude Code’s own web and desktop surfaces let you start and monitor sessions outside the terminal, included with a Claude subscription. Better if you only use Claude Code and want one vendor; useless if you also run Codex or OpenCode.

tmux plus SSH from a phone terminal remains the free, universal answer. Any device, any agent, no new software. It is also miserable to use on a phone screen, which is the gap Port22 is selling into.

Final verdict: is Port22 worth it?

Yes, if you are in the Mac and iPhone intersection and your terminal is on the supported list. Port22 does one job and does it with unusual discipline: it attaches to your existing session instead of taking it over, it needs no account, it defaults to your local network, and it encrypts what leaves it. The free tier is a real product rather than a trial, and $19.99 a year for unlimited machines and sessions is priced well below what the problem is worth to anyone running agents daily.

The constraints are what keep this off a higher score. No IDE terminals, no Warp, no Android, no Linux, and a single maker behind it, which carries the key-person risk any solo product does. The founding price will not last forever either. We rate Port22 7.5 out of 10. Download the free tier first, since it costs nothing and one Mac with two sessions is enough to tell you within a day whether this fits how you work.