Question about cloud service Push Notifications

Hi,

I work at a company where we need to provide a alternative to email to keep our users informed and we think to use a very small mobile app too handle push notification.
We currently use React for our frontend, so React-native looks like a good choice for us. I was testing your “Push Notifications” service today and it looks really good as it is really easy to implement.

I would like to know if there are any special conditions of use, I think we will have to send between 100 and 1000 notifications per day, maybe more. (I read that the service was free?)

Moreover, is it possible to do without your cloud service (https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send) and host it ourselves? I have not found any documentation on this subject.

Thanks a lot.

Regards

Hi! We don’t have any limits or quotas on use of the push notification service. Notifications are very cheap for us to send!

We don’t currently support a self-hosted version of the push service, although if you need to do something fancy like run your own push notification broker you can get the raw push token in a standalone app. I wouldn’t normally recommend that though.

If you detach and use ExpoKit, you can use any push notification provider you like, including self hosted.

For what it’s worth, we don’t store the contents of notifications we send except while they’re pending.

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Thank you for the answer.

To be honest, the fact that the service is free and without advertising is not reassuring. You say you don’t keep the data but you have at least the possibility to send notifications to users of applications developed with your solution.
Your company doesn’t make profits according to your FAQ, so the question is how will this translate for us when you decide on a way to make a profit? (The service becomes a fee, users receive advertising, data are resold, etc…)

Regards

One of the things we think is most important is the trust from developers using Expo. I could be wrong, but if we started sending unsolicited notifications (ads or otherwise) to people using apps made with Expo, I suspect that’d very quickly confuse developers and users and make them uncomfortable. This post speaks to some of our philosophy about charging a fee (whether that’s in dollars or otherwise): Expo is Free (as in 🍺 and as in 💬) | by Charlie Cheever | Exposition

As @dikaiosune said, you also can get the raw device token (the API is currently unstable though) and send notifications through another provider of your choice.

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