How Much Do Push Notifications Cost in 2026?

Push is one of the cheapest ways to reach your customers. There’s no direct cost for delivering a notification, and most push platforms include unlimited sends in every plan, meaning you can send as many messages as you like, without worrying about how the cost will scale.

The true cost of push notifications comes from two things: a push notification service to manage delivery, automation and segmentation, and the app itself that you’re sending push notifications from.

This guide breaks down all the real numbers for you: how push pricing works, the cost of major push notification platforms, any extra costs that don’t appear on pricing pages, and how push compares to SMS at the same audience size.

How Push Notification Pricing Works

Push platforms don’t all charge the same way. There are three different pricing models that most platforms are built on:

Per-Subscriber (or Per-MAU) Pricing

This is the most common model. You pay based on how many users or subscribers you have, not how many messages you send.

OneSignal is the best-known example. Its Growth plan costs $19 a month plus $0.012 per monthly active user (MAU) for mobile push, with unlimited sends. An app with 50,000 monthly active users pays $619 a month, whether it sends one notification or a thousand.

One detail to note: OneSignal counts every user who opened your app in the last 30 days, whether or not they allowed notifications. If about half your users opt in, you’re paying for twice as many users as you can actually reach.

PushEngage charges by active subscribers instead, meaning only people who opted in. It costs $79 a month for up to 10,000 subscribers, rising to $199 a month at 50,000.

Feature-Tier Pricing

Some providers sell plans in tiers, where each step up unlocks more features as well as a bigger audience. PushEngage works this way, with Business, Premium and Growth plans that add more sites, workflows and automation as you go up.

Braze and Airship also sell tiered plans, but neither publishes prices. Braze says its pricing scales with your monthly active users, and both send you to their sales teams for a quote.

With tiered plans, the jump between tiers is often driven as much by features like A/B testing, journeys and advanced segments as by audience size. Check which tier the features you need sit on, not just the subscriber limit.

Infrastructure Pricing (Pay-per-Message)

This is the developer model. Amazon SNS sends the first 1 million mobile push notifications each month for free, then charges $0.50 per million.

Azure Notification Hubs has a free tier with 1 million pushes a month for up to 500 devices. Its Basic tier costs $10 a month for 10 million pushes and up to 200,000 devices, and Standard costs $200 a month, with $1 to $10 for each extra million pushes depending on the tier.

These services are delivery infrastructure, not marketing platforms. You build the segments, automations, campaign tools and reporting yourself.

For most ecommerce brands, per-user or tiered pricing is the right fit. Infrastructure pricing only makes sense if you have an engineering team to build and run the rest of your notification stack.

How Much Do Push Notifications Cost?

Push notification costs typically grow with your audience, not with how much you send. Most major platforms include unlimited mobile push sends, so your bill depends on how many app users you have - and you can message each user as much as you want, without worrying about running up the bill.

Here’s what two of the biggest self-serve platforms charge at different sizes, on monthly billing.

OneSignal counts everyone who used your app in the last 30 days, while PushEngage counts only the people who allowed notifications. PushEngage also costs less if you pay annually.

Here’s how pricing works on the push platforms you’re most likely to come across:

• OneSignal: Free for apps with up to 1,000 monthly active users, with unlimited mobile push, web push to up to 10,000 subscribers per send and 10,000 emails a month. The paid plan adds web push at $0.004 per subscriber and email at $1.50 per 1,000 after the first 20,000.
• Klaviyo: Push comes with every Klaviyo plan, free and paid, at no extra charge. But you pay for the plan itself, which is billed by active profiles: $150 a month for 10,000 profiles, for example. If you already pay for those customers for email or SMS, push is effectively a free add-on.
• PushEngage: Free for up to 200 subscribers and 30 campaigns, then from $19 a month for 1,000 subscribers.
• Omnisend: Web push only, sent to shoppers’ browsers rather than to an app. The free plan includes 500 web push notifications a month, and paid plans, from $16 a month for up to 500 contacts, include unlimited web push.
• Braze, Airship and OneSignal’s higher plans: Prices by quote only, based on your audience size, channels and features, usually on an annual contract.

The important pattern: your push bill is a fixed monthly cost based on audience size. Whether you send two campaigns a week or 20, it doesn’t change. That’s the fundamental difference between push and SMS, where every message adds to the bill.

Can You Send Push Notifications for Free?

Yes, you can send push notifications for free. But how far “free” goes depends on your audience size and how much you’re willing to build yourself.

Truly Free: Platform Free Tiers

OneSignal’s Free plan includes unlimited mobile push for apps with up to 1,000 monthly active users, and PushEngage’s Free plan covers 200 subscribers and 30 campaigns. Klaviyo includes push in every plan, but its plans are billed by active profiles, so push is only free if you’re already paying for those customers for email or SMS.

These are real plans, not just trials. For a new app with a small audience, or a brand already paying for Klaviyo, they cover the essentials.

Free Delivery, DIY Everything Else

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) costs nothing on either of Firebase’s plans, and Apple lists no per-message fee for its Apple Push Notification service (APNs), beyond the $99 a year every iPhone app developer pays. These are the pipelines every mobile push notification travels through, including those sent by the platforms above.

But FCM and APNs are infrastructure, not products. To use them directly, you need to:

• Build a backend to store and manage device tokens
• Handle tokens that change after reinstalls and updates
• Build segments, so you’re not sending everyone the same message
• Create a campaign tool your marketing team can use
• Set up reporting to track deliveries, opens and orders
• Build automated flows like abandoned cart, price drop and back-in-stock alerts
• Handle errors, retries and expired tokens

So you can send push notifications for “free”. But you’ll need to do the work to build and maintain software to handle the sending. The same way you can technically send emails for free through your own Gmail account, instead of paying for an email service like Klaviyo or Mailchimp.

Most businesses find it’s more cost-effective to simply pay for a service to take care of the delivery.

Are There Any Extra Costs Associated with Push Notifications?

The price on a push platform’s pricing page isn’t always the full picture. Here’s what can add to your actual spend.

Analytics and Segmentation Upsells

Most providers keep their best features for higher tiers. Basic delivery might be cheap, but behavior-based segments, A/B testing, revenue tracking and multi-step journeys often sit on a professional or enterprise plan.

OneSignal’s Professional plan, for example, adds advanced analytics and experiments, and is sold on an annual contract by quote. Check what’s included in the tier you’re looking at, not just the audience limit.

Other Channels on the Same Bill

Many push platforms also sell email, SMS and in-app messages, and these are usually priced separately. On OneSignal’s Growth plan, email costs $1.50 per 1,000 after the first 20,000 sends a month, and SMS is priced through its sales team.

Push itself is still unlimited. But if you move other channels onto the same platform, budget for them separately.

Integration and Development Time

Even managed platforms need setting up. Connecting push to your store, tracking events like abandoned carts and product views, setting up deep links so each notification opens the right page, and testing across devices all take engineering time.

Platform Lock-In Costs

If you’ve built automations, segments and reports in one platform and need to switch, moving isn’t trivial. Your subscriber data may or may not come with you cleanly.

It isn’t a monthly line item, but it’s a real cost to weigh when choosing a provider.

The App Itself

Mobile push notifications need a mobile app. (You can send push from a website too, but most of the time, when someone talks about push notifications, they’re talking about native mobile push notifications, sent from an app).

A mobile app is not free. You need to pay someone to build it, or for a software or service to do it for you.

Publishing an app also has fixed fees: the Apple Developer Program costs $99 a year, and a Google Play developer account costs $25 once.

The cost of having an app in the first place is likely to be the biggest cost associated with push notifications. You get a lot more for what you pay than just push, of course - but be aware that you can’t just get a free OneSignal plan and start sending native push right off the bat.

Push vs Email vs SMS: What Does It Cost to Reach Your Audience?

Per-message rates are useful, but hide a lot, especially when you consider how different channels are billed. The real comparison becomes clearer when you look at the cost at scale.

Here’s an example of what push and SMS would cost at three audience sizes, messaging several times per week. We’re using OneSignal’s Growth plan for push and Postscript’s Growth plan for SMS. Postscript charges $100 a month plus $0.008 per text, and US carrier fees add about $0.0033 more.

At every size, SMS costs roughly 8 to 12 times as much as push for the same number of messages. And the gap widens with every campaign you add, because each extra push costs nothing, whereas SMS carries an incremental cost.

Email costs about the same as push. Platforms like Klaviyo, Omnisend and Mailchimp charge by the size of your list and include a set number of sends, so, like push, the bill grows with your audience, not with how much you send. Klaviyo’s email plan costs $720 a month for 50,000 profiles, close to the $619 a month for push to 50,000 app users on OneSignal.

What These Numbers Mean For You

At scale, push is significantly cheaper than SMS, and it’s not close.

But you can’t just replace all your SMS sends with push. More customers will give you their phone number than will download your app, so you’ll almost always be able to reach more people by SMS. And only about half of app users allow notifications: across all apps, Airship’s 2026 benchmarks put the median opt-in rate at 48.85% on iPhone and 53.3% on Android in 2025.

In reality, you’ll always send SMS and email alongside push, because each customer has their own preferred channel, where they’re easiest to reach.

Still, the more customers you can get to download your app and turn on notifications, the more messages you can move from SMS to push, and the better for your profit and loss. Every abandoned cart reminder, flash sale or back-in-stock alert that goes out as a push instead of a text costs you nothing extra.

Are Push Notifications Worth the Cost?

Push is one of the highest-ROI channels available, because the cost side stays fixed while the sends are free.

Push plays a bigger role than just driving profitable sales, too. App users who get at least one push notification in their first 90 days have a third higher retention than those who don’t, according to Airship.

So push can also help keep users more engaged with your app, driving tertiary benefits beside what the actual campaigns or automations bring.

And push does drive sales. Ecommerce apps averaged click-through rates of 3.05% on iPhone and 3.78% on Android from late 2024 to mid-2025, according to Pushwoosh. We found brands in our benchmark report making between $10,000 and $200,000 per month from automated push notifications alone.

A Back-of-the-Napkin ROI Calculation

The cost figures we showed above don’t exactly scream “cheap” - you could be paying several thousands per month on push, after all. But it gets a lot better when you look at it in context.

Say your app has 40,000 monthly active users, and about half of them allow notifications. On OneSignal’s Growth plan, that costs $499 a month. You send eight campaigns a month to your 20,000 opted-in users.

With a 3% click-through rate, just under Pushwoosh’s ecommerce averages, and assuming 2% of clicks turn into orders at a $75 average order value:

• 20,000 subscribers x 8 campaigns = 160,000 notifications
• 160,000 x 3% click-through rate = 4,800 clicks
• 4,800 x 2% conversion rate = 96 orders
• 96 orders x $75 = $7,200 in monthly revenue
• Monthly platform cost: $499

That’s an example, and your conversion rate and order value will differ. But even at half these numbers, campaigns alone cover the platform several times over. And it’s before you count automated flows like abandoned cart notifications, which perform much better on a message for message basis than any other type of push notification.

For ecommerce brands, it isn’t really a question whether push notifications are worth the cost. If you’re already sending SMS, replacing (or supplementing) those sends with push notifications is a real no-brainer.

"The power of push notifications is so strong. In a world where people open email less and less each day, everyone is jumping into SMS which is crazy expensive, and people are starting to tune these out too, being able to do push notifications is the reason you do an app."

How to Start Sending Push Notifications

For push to be a real revenue channel, you need a mobile app. And if you already have an ecommerce website, you don’t need to rebuild everything from scratch.

MobiLoud builds a native app for your brand, powered by your website. It updates with your site automatically, and delivers a unique experience, powered by the same code and tools as your website. Your storefront, checkout, loyalty program and everything else on your site just works in the app. It’s as simple as that.

We build, publish and maintain your app, helping you go live in a few weeks, without the cost and complexity of a traditional app build. We set up push notifications in your app from launch day, running through OneSignal or Klaviyo (on Business and Enterprise plans), so you get all the benefits of the industry’s top push notification services powering your new channel.

If you want to unlock the power of native push notifications for your ecommerce brand, MobiLoud is the best way to make it happen.