Are push notifications free?
The delivery is. Firebase Cloud Messaging is free at any volume, and so is Apple Push Notification service. You can send a hundred million notifications a month and pay nothing for transport.
What costs money is everything around it: deciding who receives what, scheduling sends by timezone, running A/B tests, and knowing what happened afterwards. That is the product managed providers sell, and the reason teams pay for it is that building it is often more expensive than renting it.
Build it or buy it?
The honest maths: a managed provider at AED 3,000 of integration plus a modest monthly fee versus roughly AED 14,000 to build segmentation, scheduling and analytics yourself — plus the ongoing cost of maintaining it.
- Go direct with FCM when notifications are purely transactional — order updates, chat messages, alerts. There is no campaign to manage, so there is nothing to buy.
- Use a managed provider when marketing owns notifications and needs to send campaigns without a developer, or when you need delivery analytics to justify the channel.
- Look at enterprise platforms only when push is one channel in a cross-channel lifecycle programme alongside email, SMS and in-app.
Subscriber count is what you are billed on
Almost every managed provider prices on subscribers, not sends. Sending one notification a month to 100,000 people costs the same as sending fifty. That flips the usual optimisation instinct: pruning inactive subscribers saves money, sending less does not.
Most apps carry a long tail of devices that uninstalled or revoked permission months ago. Cleaning that list quarterly is the single most effective way to control this bill — and it improves your delivery metrics at the same time.
The costs that are not the provider
Two things regularly cost more than the push platform. The first is SMS fallback — sending critical alerts by SMS when push fails or is disabled. At roughly $0.035 per message in the UAE, even a 5% fallback rate on a busy app becomes a real line item. Price the rest of your integrations in the API cost calculator.
The second is the engineering around delivery: deep linking so a tap opens the right screen, permission prompts timed so users say yes, quiet hours, preference centres, and handling token refresh. None of that comes free with any provider, and it is what separates a notification system users tolerate from one they turn off.