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I suspect that the cost for push notifications might have to do with the costs imposed by Apple and Google for their respective OSes' notifications backends, bu
by nrr 2y ago
I suspect that the cost for push notifications might have to do with the costs imposed by Apple and Google for their respective OSes' notifications backends, but don't quote me on that. The $3.5/user/month smells like a way to recoup that kind of cost without making it overly burdensome for folks within one standard deviation of the mean.
That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.
- cvwright 2y agoI don’t think Apple charges for APNS do they? I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?
- nrr 2y agoIt seems you're right. I'm thinking of the third-party APNs (why does Apple insist on the lowercase "s" here?) server providers who do sometimes bill on a per-notification basis. I'll admit that I know basically nothing about how this ecosystem works in 2024, particularly as it relates to push notifications from self-hosted applications as Zulip can sometimes be.
- cvwright 2y agoAh, yes you do have to run a service of some kind to interface with Apple. For example the Matrix project provides Sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal which the owner of a Matrix client can run on their own systems. It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.