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I don’t think Apple charges for APNS do they?

I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?

It seems you're right. I'm thinking of the third-party APNs (why does Apple insist on the lowercase "s" here?) server providers who do sometimes bill on a per-notification basis.

I'll admit that I know basically nothing about how this ecosystem works in 2024, particularly as it relates to push notifications from self-hosted applications as Zulip can sometimes be.

Ah, yes you do have to run a service of some kind to interface with Apple. For example the Matrix project provides Sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal which the owner of a Matrix client can run on their own systems.

It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.

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