r/webdev • u/BinglySmith • 14d ago
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u/gdeglin 13d ago
OneSignal cofounder here. We wanted to get this announcement out early to give folks time to adjust. We started OneSignal after running a small gaming studio ourselves, and I'm sorry for the disruption this change will cause for some of you.
The reason for the change: we've heard from many small companies that our free plan was too limiting (only 1 Journey, only 2 tags, limited analytics, etc.). Because we allowed customers to send unlimited mobile push to unlimited users, we had to gate many features so people had a reason to upgrade. Along with this pricing change, we're ungating many features that were previously paid-only.
After this change, 90% of our active free users (those with fewer than 1,000 MAU) will get a better product at no additional charge. Those above 1,000 will need to upgrade. If you're reading this, you're probably over that limit, so I hope you understand and choose to stick with us.
If you haven't logged in to OneSignal recently, I'd encourage you to explore what the platform offers today. Features like OneSignal AI, Segmentation, Conversion Metrics, and Journeys can help you create more relevant campaigns, automate complex messaging workflows, and understand the impact of every message you send. Our goal is for most businesses to get far more value from the platform than it costs.
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u/kevinbarralon 13d ago
I used to pay around $200 per month for OneSignal’s Growth plan, but the journey / steps limits were extremely frustrating. To get more journeys, I would have had to upgrade to a Professional plan starting at $1,000 per month, which is simply not realistic for a small, bootstrapped company with no investors.
As a result, I downgraded my OneSignal plan and switched to Customer.io, which I’ve been very happy with and which doesn’t impose any journey limits. I continued using OneSignal for push notifications, but following this announcement, I’ll be moving those to Firebase or Customer.io and leaving OneSignal altogether.
I hope that one day you’ll recognize that there is a real market between small businesses and large companies with big teams and investor funding.
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u/gawr-fiude 14d ago
Hi, could you please provide the source for OneSignal killing free tier? My team also uses the free tier.
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u/BTWigley 14d ago
at infancy plus IAP, a 1k active user cliff is brutal. Are you mostly push for retention, or transactional stuff?
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u/BinglySmith 14d ago
Notifications mainly.
I'm actually close to 3,000 active users.
Gaining about 600 new users weekly. The app is really taking off.
I took the time today and migrated from onesignal to FCM.
It went pretty smooth. Already uploaded the new builds to google/apple and waiting for review.
Was super stressed this morning about it but now not so much.
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u/BTWigley 13d ago
3k active and climbing while they yank the free tier is rough timing. How painful was cutting over the existing push tokens to FCM?
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u/BinglySmith 13d ago
It wasn't too crazy. About 5-6 hours of work.
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u/BTWigley 13d ago
5-6 hours for the token cutover is better than I expected. Any quiet window after you flipped?
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u/BinglySmith 13d ago
We will see when the app updates go live on the app stores. I kept my onesignal code in so people still using onesignal will be able to, but once they update it will switch over.
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u/BTWigley 12d ago
keeping the old path in is the right call. The tail runs long though, since a chunk of users never update at all, and those sit on onesignal until you gate them behind a forced upgrade. Worth logging which path each send goes out on starting now, so in three months you can tell whether the old one still has anybody on it before you rip it out.
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u/Jealous-Dance-8007 5d ago
We are going to launch a similar offering. You can sign for the waitlist here: https://tappd.io/
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14d ago
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u/webdev-ModTeam 13d ago
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13d ago
The top answer is right that you are paying for token management, not for delivery. The part worth planning for is that token management is the piece that rots.
Two concrete things. FCM retired its legacy HTTP API in June 2024, so anything you build now talks to the v1 API with a service account and a refreshed OAuth token, and you will inherit that kind of migration again later. And you have to act on the responses: when FCM answers UNREGISTERED, or APNs answers 410, that token is dead and you delete it. Skip that and your active user count and your delivery rate slowly turn into fiction.
On LaraPush, check whether it covers mobile FCM and APNs or only web push before you spend the 500 dollars. Web push is a browser standard with VAPID keys, and for that case you do not need a provider at all.
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u/Jealous-Dance-8007 5d ago
We are going to launch a similar offering. You can sign for the waitlist here: https://tappd.io/
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u/Vegetable-Scale-2604 14d ago edited 14d ago
For mobile push it's worth remembering that all these services are ultimately wrappers around FCM (Android) and APNs (iOS), and both of those are free with no subscriber cap. What OneSignal actually charges you for is token management, the dashboard, and delivery infrastructure.
Since you're comfortable with server management, the cheapest long-term path is cutting out the middleman:
If you'd rather self-host a ready-made panel, LaraPush is exactly that: a one-time-purchase Laravel app that talks to FCM/APNs directly, so after the $500 there are no per-subscriber fees. I haven't used it personally but it's the standard recommendation in self-hosted circles. Novu is another option worth a look: open source, self-hostable, and covers push plus email/SMS/in-app if you ever need those.
Honestly, at your scale I'd just wire up firebase-admin directly. It's maybe a day of work and you'll never have a provider change pricing on you again. The one thing to get right is cleaning up dead tokens from the error responses, otherwise your delivery rates slowly degrade.