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I've been evaluating options for sending mobile push notifications and looked at pricing of Microsoft's vs Amazon's hub offerings. I think I must have miss-calculated since the Microsoft offer is coming out 20 times the cost! Can someone please point out where I went wrong?

The Microsoft pricing is based on a 12 month plan, giving a unit cost of £3.29 per day. Each unit can sent 166,667 messages and I need to send 1.8m per day (roughly 54m per month).

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Rob Bowman
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2 Answers2

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I'll say upfront that I am inherently biased, since I work on Azure.

But these are significantly different services.

Amazon SNS primary scenario is push to individual devices, or small groups of devices. You need to maintain the endpoints, and pre-create topics. You can do multicast with topics, but a topic afaik cannot have more than 10K devices, so you can only multicast to 10K users at a time.

Notification Hubs offers you segmented/personalized push engagement for millions of users. You can broadcast to unlimited # of devices with a single API call, you can manage segments/target arbitrary segment expressions, personalize/localize your pushes using templates, etc.

If you don't need any of the extra features Notification Hubs offers, and just need a simple push to individual devices, Azure pricing page advises contacting mobileservices@microsoft.com for low price offering for high volume individual push scenarios.

Stemado
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Kirill Gavrylyuk
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    Note on the 10K limit - as of 19 AUG 2014, the limit has been lifted. There is still a 10M administrative limit, but that can be lifted easily on a per-app basis on request. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/sns-large-topics-and-mpns-auth-mode/ – Darius Apr 16 '15 at 12:08
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Quick update to my previous answer. Starting September, Azure Notification Hubs offers more flexible (and much cheaper) pricing with three tiers:

1) Free tier - up to 1M push notifications monthly for free

2) Basic tier - basic push notifications at $1 per million pushes.

3) Standard tier - rich push notification capabilities (large scale instant broadcasts, dynamic segments, rich telemetry, etc) at $2.5 - $20 per million pushes depending on the volume.

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/notification-hubs/

Kirill Gavrylyuk
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    Pricing seems to have changed again. standard tier is now 200 dollar a month at azure. We have > 200k active devices and are forced to move to standard. Sending around 10 million push message a month. So, my calculation now is: Azure Standard per month 200 dollar AWS 10* 0.50 = 5 dollar For out case, azure is 40 times more expensive. – Henk J Meulekamp Aug 23 '16 at 19:05
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    The "active devices" limit is killer for tons of mobile app use cases IMO, making simple messages to single users or small groups way too expensive, especially since services such as Firebase (Google) Cloud Messaging do the heavy lifting. I wrote to the MSFT group address provided above to inquire about this and will post an update here. – Philipp Sumi Sep 09 '16 at 15:20
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    Nope, unfortunately not. I inquired through a blog post once and the only answer was that they wouldn't comment on other vendor's prices :) Azure has a great pricing model, but Notification Hubs is severely off. I trust it'll correct itself in time though, and we can afford the wait. If we didn't, I would switch to SNS though. It can nicely co-exists with an existing Azure stack IMO. – Philipp Sumi Jan 24 '17 at 23:21