It's entirely possible that for your use case, Airship provided you with no value. But, just as a thought experiment: - Did you also build the audience segment

It's entirely possible that for your use case, Airship provided you with no value. But, just as a thought experiment: - Did you also build the audience segmentation system (and UI) for your marketing team? - Did you build a scheduled / triggered push system with per-device (or user account) rate limiting? - Did you build the streaming data interconnect to pipe audience data back to anywhere else in your organization? - Did you build the capability to remove devices that uninstalled your app from your notification list (surprisingly tricky, at least a few years ago, and APNS and Google will start getting very upset with you if you don't do this) - Did you build an embeddable notification inbox with state synced across devices? - Did you build a CDN for in-app notifications with video / images? Because Airship did, and they will sell you all of that in one package. They'll charge an arm and a leg for it, but they do a lot more than just sit as a middleman between you and APNS when sending notifications. The relatively simple backend tech is definitely not their product, and if that's all you used from them then I would understand your frustration.