Push notification billing

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1

I’m excited to see iOS push notifications, but I’m needing some clarify on how they are counted towards billing.

  • Do both iOS and Android push notifications fall under the same category now?

  • Does each push notification count as an update?

For example, if we have an event app with 300 users, and say 200 of those are iOS users and 100 are Android. Assuming that all 300 people have given permission for push notifications on their phone, every time I send out a notification, would that count as 200 updates per those 200 iOS users? Or would it count as 300 for all 300 users (both iOS and Android)?

Thanks!

2

Hi Megan,

Notifications are the same cost regardless of device a user is on (that includes desktop if they turned on notifications there.)

That would cost 300 updates to send to all users, presuming they all allowed notifications. I believe it does not cost an update for users who have not allowed notifications.

You can also target the notifications to a subset of users as well. For example to only attendees of a specific session, or to people who registered for an event but have not yet registered for individual sessions.

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3

Have you found the push notification to work well? Or is it kind of buggy still?

4

Not sure about others, but it’s working well for me on MacOS. Sometimes it doesn’t show on iOS, though.

5

Mostly works from what I’ve seen, except for one major issue. The issue is you can’t specify recipients of notifications while using anonymous emails. So, you can’t use notifications (except for sending to ALL users) unless you’re willing to leak all your user’s email addresses. Perhaps that’s fine on an internal business tool, but it’s not at all ok with me.

So I’m waiting to launch the rebuild of my main app until this gets updated.

An upvote here might help: Push notifications with anonymous login emails

6

But I could use targeted push notifications say for everyone who has favorited a specific session at my event. If that session is then cancelled for some reason or it gets moved to a different room, I could send out a push notification to everyone who had favorited that session, yes?

7

Yes, you can do that.

Here’s a lesson on sending notifications to specific users using a similar example of targeting users who followed a post, receiving notifications when someone comments.

8

There’s another layer of complexity to that. You have to store a list of people who have favorited a session somewhere. If you simply use a user-specific boolean then you won’t get the list.