Pricing: Are push notifications really free?

Question

According to the parse.com pricing page, push notifications are free up to 1 million unique recipients.

API calls are free up to 30 requests / second.

I want to make sure there is no catch here.

An example will clarify: I have 100K subscribed users. I will send weekly push notifications to them. In a month, that will be 4 push "blasts" with 100K recipients each. Is this covered by the free tier? Would this count as 4 API calls, 400K API calls, or some other amount?

Answer 1

100k users is 1/10 the advertised unique recipient limit, so that should be okay.

Remember that there's a 10sec timeout, too. So the only way to blast 100k pushes within the free-tier resource limits is to create a scheduled job that spends about 2 hours (that's a safe rate of 15 req/sec) doing pushes and writing state so you can pick up later where you left off.

Assuming there's no hidden gotcha (you'll probably need to discover those empirically), I think the only gotcha in plain sight is the fact that the free tier allows only one (1) scheduled job. Any other long-running processing -- and there are bound to be some on 100k users -- are going to have to share the job, making the what-should-this-single-job-work-on-now logic pretty complex.

Answer 2

You should take a look at the FAQ for Parse.com:

https://www.parse.com/plans/faq

What is considered an API request?

Anytime you make a network call to Parse on behalf of your app using one of the Parse SDKs or REST API, it counts as an API request. This does include things like queries, saves, logins, amongst other kinds of requests. It also includes requests to send push notifications, although this is seen as a single request regardless of how many recipients are targeted. Serving Parse files counts as an API request, including static assets served from Parse Hosting. Analytics requests do have a special exemption. You can send us your analytics events any time without being limited by your app's request limit.