Cost of Azure Notification Hubs vs Amazon SNS

Question

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).

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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/