OneSignal has been in the push notification arena almost since its inception. It is a well-known tool, especially popular as a free push notification solution. While many believe that OneSignal is a free tool, it is far from reality. They have 3 pricing plans where prices increase with the number of subscribers. Read on to know about available features in their free plan, how the OneSignal pricing structure looks like, and a lot more. 

3 OneSignal Pricing Plans and 1 Contact Us

Forever free plan: 10,000 recipients per message on web push, 1 in-app message
Email & SMS. If you have more than 10,000 subscribers, notifications will be sent to only 10,000 subscribers in the free OneSignal pricing. The enterprise plan has custom planning, so one needs to get in touch with the OneSignal team to arrive at the pricing.

While the features remain the same based on the OneSignal pricing plans businesses choose, the price increases with the number of subscribers. It basically has a fixed platform fee and variable subscriber fee. While the price does not seem to go up significantly, from what we have seen, the subscriber count keeps going up as you build an audience. 

How Does the Cost Grow as your Subscribers Grow?

The free OneSignal pricing plan lets one send notifications to only 10,000 subscribers, the growth plan is till 100,000 subscribers for $309 and on the professional plan, after 150,000 subscribers it turns into a custom plan. As for features, here is what each plan consists of.

Reviewing Features Offered Across Different OneSignal Pricing Plans

The above-mentioned features are available on the free plan, which is a pretty good deal, provided you don’t have a lot of subscribers. Features naturally increase with other paid plans giving one advance capabilities. 

One can create dynamic segment-based filters such as activity, country, language, interests and so on. One can also use segments based on usage - subscribed, active, engaged, inactive.   One can also create advanced segments based on tags and location data as well. In the free plan, one can create just 6 segments. 

With workflows, one can send only one notification per workflow based on the trigger you set. If you want to send more notifications you will have to create multiple workflows, as a sequence of notifications cannot be created. This makes it cumbersome for editors and marketers. 

As for A/B testing, both professional and enterprise plans have advanced A/B testing, which allows one to create not just 2, but 10 variants of a message at once. One can test different push message contents and compare various notification options, such as images, sounds, and action buttons. 

All four OneSignal pricing plans support timezone delivery, which is handy if you have a global audience. This ensures that the scheduled notifications are sent to a user as per their timezone. All four plans also have an option where businesses can show a custom prompt with categories to choose from. Users can choose the categories they are interested in, making it easier to send contextual notifications based on user preferences.

One can delay the notification sent to users based on the action you define for a user. This however starts from the Growth plan. You can also know the devices which have successfully got the notification you sent, helping identify the dead subscribers. This increases the understanding of the user’s engagement across channels and provides CTR based on the notifications that were actually delivered.

Retargeting users becomes essential when it comes to capturing users who leave before they perform the desired action. If a user has clicked on a particular notification and has not taken any action, you can follow up with another notification. You can retarget based on clicked, not clicked if the message got delivered, message sent, and so on.

Under Advanced analytics, OneSignal offers conversion tracking. This is helpful when you want to see end to end impact of your marketing campaigns. Apart from the standard conversion events like - page visit, sessions, session duration, time spent on the app, marketers can also set up to 100 custom conversion events and track them. This is redundant for those who use Google Analytics extensively. Marketers prefer sticking to one source of truth - which for most is their analytics platform.

Advanced analytics starts only from the professional plan. In advanced analytics, you can track things like which notifications are driving engagement like article shares, add to cart, and which are driving more sales. Notification capping by limiting a maximum number of notifications sent to a user per hour, day, or week is available in the enterprise plan.

OneSignal as an Omnichannel Marketing software

Onesignal offers in-app messages, email and SMS along with web push notifications across all the pricing plans. The plans however are the same for all of the channels. In the free plan, businesses have access to 1 in-app message Email & SMS. 

The OneSignal email composer is built atop transactional email services such as SendGrid, Mailgun, and Mandrill. As for SMS, OneSignal makes sure that messages are delivered by making use of Twilio. Basically, both email and SMS are not free. One has to pay for other tools and then configure it with OneSignal.

All features are enabled, irrespective of the plan one is on. In the Growth Plan, $3 per 1,000 in-app impressions. SMS has a free trial, after which one has to talk to sales for the exact quote. As for email, ​​they are giving a free trial till Dec 1, 2021. 

Which OneSignal pricing plan is best for you?

Free - This plan is crafted for small businesses that do not have a lot of traffic pouring in. Usually, people start off with this plan and then scale up if they like the tool. The free plan however has features a small business can comfortably work with. 

Growth - The growth plan is for businesses that are seeing an increase in traffic and are looking at better features to reach out to their audience effectively. With this plan, businesses get to create 10 segments and 10 automated workflows. 

Professional - As the name suggests this is for professionals who already have things set up, traffic pouring in are focussing more on segmentation and complex targeting. When the main aim is retention and building a loyal audience. 

Enterprise - Brands that are looking to get the best of the best service, to have everything set up and okay with shelling out more money to get access to all the features, additional account management, and customization support. Best for businesses looking for an annual contract and get things done. 

Customer Support 

Customer support starts from the free plan itself giving customers a way to get their issues solved. In the free plan they offer support over email. As it moves to the growth plan they prioritize the emails in professional they have 24/7 prioritize email and in the enterprise plan they have 24/7 prioritized email & on-call support.

 How are you billed when subscribers go up?

OneSignal pricing month on month based on subscribers and different plans. Your traffic is bound to increase as months pass so are your subscribers, and by now you know what that translates to. Check out a month-on-month spend one can expect with OneSignal and other push notification platforms. 

Can one monetize their audience with OneSignal?

Unlike some tools that has push notifications ads, OneSignal has no such monetization plan in place. Which is a bummer especially for publishers and affiliates. 

Are all OneSignal pricing plans based on a month-on-month basis?

All plans are month-on-month basic except the enterprise plans. Enterprise plans are paid on an annual basis.

Can one downgrade or cancel the plan?

If one is on a Growth or Professional plan, then they can downgrade to free right from the dashboard. The changes will take place at the end of the billing period. It goes without saying that a downgrade on price also means a downgrade of features. The folks on the Enterprise plan need to get in touch with the account head to make any changes.

Does OneSignal have a free trial?

OneSignal’s pricing starts with a free plan, but they do offer a free trial for their Grow and Professional plans. Though it is not up on their site, it is mentioned on G2Crowd and Capterra that they provide free trials. However, they were providing a free trial through December 1st, 2021 for email. And they are still provisioning a free trial for SMS. Once basically has to get in touch with sales to avail this. 

Does OneSignal provide discounts?

Who does not? Enterprise customers get custom deals - where discounts are baked in. Get in touch with the sales representative.

Alternatives to OneSignal

While there are many alternatives to one signal, there are seven that are worth comparing it with, based on features, pricing, ease of use and customer support. We have gone ahead and compared seven alternatives to One Signal - iZooto, PushEngage, Aimtell, FoxPush, PushCrew (VWO Engage), Pushowl and Pushnami. You definitely need to compare these tools before you plan to finalize on OneSignal. The idea is to get the best of the best features, how easy the tool is to set up, how it needs to be a no-brainer to use the tool, and one also needs to keep in mind the pricing. To achieve your business goals, you need to take out time to analyze so that you don't end up thinking about how you can migrate it to the next tool.
Head to this in-depth article to compare the pricing and features of other providers such as Aimtell, PushEngage, Pushnami and Push Owl.