Is Apple Push notification using APNS free of cost?

Question

We are planning to develop the push notification service for a telecom operator. But I haven't got any information whether the APNS push service is free of cost or should we make any payment?

My questions are,

1. Should I pay for using the APNS push service?
2. If operator want to sent push notification to millions of subscribers, should we pay to Apple or is it absolutely free? If not free, please share the URL where payment details are available.
3. Is there any limit for the number of notification sent or the number of subscribers?

Please help to get answer for these questions.

Answer 1

Apple does not charge a separate fee for utilizing the push notification service.

Your only cost is a server that will be sending the push notifications to Apple. There are third-parties that provide this servers and there is a fee for that.

Answer 2

Answer for your question 1,2 and 3 is: Apple doesn't charge you for APNS - but you have to maintain a server for pushing.

Try these third parties for pushing,

• PushWizard ( https://pushwizard.com ), a free and unlimited push service.

It can send 250 million push messages / hour and PushWizard is free for unlimited devices, while other services can be very expensive if you have more, than 1 million users to reach at least ONCE per month.

• Monopush ( http://www.monopush.com ), which provides a RESTful API and a lot of free push alerts up-front to handle the server infrastructure for you.

You need just copy and paste a few line codes to inside of your application and then magic will be started. After that you can start to watch , analyze , categorize your clients and you can send push messages to them as well as resource messages.

Answer 3

Plz refer the following

1. APNS is a free service. However, you need to maintain a server to send Push Messages.

   Apple Local and Push Notification Programming Guide

2. There are many online servers which provide you free push services [for limited pushes/users/devices]. They do have plans depending upon the needs of client. Following are the few ones:

   a. Parse Parse not available anymore. It is now acquired by Facebook. Read More Here

   b. PushWizard

   c. Xtify

   d. SetUp your own push server - this tutroial comprise of complete end to end steps of how to send push messages to iOS Devices.

Hope this helps !!!

Answer 4

As mentioned above, Apple does not charge for the APNS However, you need to maintain a 3rd party server for that, and sending notifications to millions of devices would require a lot of work from you. There are some very good industrial solutions for iOS push notifications service that use APNS:

• PushApps - free for 1M notifications per month, and unlimited notifications for 19.99 per month - here is the documentation
• Urban Airship - free up to 1M notifications per month, afterwards you are charged per 1000 notifications
• PushWoosh - free for 1M devices, premium plans are from 39 EURO

Diclaimer - I work in PushApps and also use their product in my applications for over a year now.

Answer 5

Although push notifications are usually send from 'servers', it is not necessary to own a server or to pay a service. Instead it is also possible to send pushes from your personal computer or mobile device. Especially for testing purposes, this is very useful. Try:

• NWPusher
• APNS-Pusher