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iPhone developers rejoice: Urban Airship launches push notification beta

Portland-based Urban Airship, the little company that’s going to help iPhone app developers scale in big ways, has announced that they are now accepting participants as part of their beta program for Apple Push Notification Services.

Portland-based Urban Airship, the little company that’s going to help iPhone app developers scale in big ways, has announced that they are now accepting participants as part of their beta program for Apple Push Notification Services.

If you’re a developer working on an iPhone app and you want to take advantage of iPhone OS 3.0 features, I’d highly suggest you check it out. Even if you’re not, the whole setup is pretty impressive.

The Urban Airship team—being developers themselves—has been incredibly thoughtful about how they’re going to price the offering and they’re to make it as easy on you as possible. That way, you can focus on developing cool apps.

The biggest question we get from just about every developer that reaches out to us is “what is the pricing going to be?” We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with early-access beta developers about what this should look like as well as members of the iPhone developer community. Our goal is to make sure that the developers using our services never ask themselves “could I do this cheaper myself?” To that end, we’ve come up with pricing that we hope is reasonable for application developers

So how cheap is cheap? The first 5,000 messages per month are free. So if you have a limited user base or aren’t planning to push very much to the client, you’ve got wiggle room.

Need more? For $29.99 even per month (apparently I have iPhone app pricing on the brain), they’ll give you 50,000 messages. And if you push more than that, they’ll charge a per message fee of about $0.001 per message.

And of course if you know you’re going to be pushing way more than that, there’s always the “let’s talk” option for figuring out a pricing structure.

What the heck am I talking about? Read more about Apple Push Notification Services.

Or, if you’re all in tune with what the cool kids are doing with the iPhone, head on over to Urban Airship to read more about the beta.

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  1. That’ll add up quick. If you push once a day with 1,000 users, that’s 30,000 pushes a month. Even if you push once a week with that many users, it’s 4,000 a month. But double the users and it grows…

    So you really want to have a reason to push.

    Interesting though.

    And it’s likely pricing will only go down as competition goes up…

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