What sending push notifications costs at scale.
Push delivery itself costs nothing via APNs/FCM — you pay for the tooling around it. Judge the platform on features, not just price. For messaging comparison see the email & SMS guides.
The Push Notification Cost Calculator estimates your monthly bill for sending mobile and web push notifications. It multiplies your notifications per month by the price per 1M notifications to produce a projected monthly cost, and lets you view that figure against your monthly active users to see the effective cost per user. The main drivers are volume and unit price: bills scale directly with how many messages you send, so notification frequency per user and total audience size are what move the number most.
A practical tip is to watch notifications per active user rather than the raw total. High-frequency campaigns — re-engagement pings, transactional alerts, and marketing blasts — multiply quickly across a large user base, and a small per-message price can still add up at scale. Before increasing send frequency, weigh the added cost against opt-out and uninstall risk, since fewer, well-targeted notifications often deliver better retention than sheer volume at a similar or lower spend.
The underlying delivery (Apple APNs, Google FCM) is free. Paid push services charge for volume, audience segmentation, scheduling and analytics — usually per notification or per monthly active user.
For simple sends, native APNs/FCM are free. Paid platforms earn their fee with targeting, A/B testing, delivery analytics and cross-platform management — worth it as your volume and sophistication grow.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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