Case study: web push as a price-drop channel — OneSignal vs Perfecty

Case study: web push as a price-drop channel — OneSignal vs Perfecty

A deals review site added browser push for price alerts, testing a hosted tool vs self-hosted for 10 weeks.

OneSignal
Pros: free tier, easy setup, segmentation, reliable delivery
Cons: free tier shows their branding, data sits on their servers

Perfecty (self-hosted)
Pros: free, own your data, no per-subscriber cost
Cons: you run the server, deliverability is on you

Result: at 28,000 subscribers, price-drop push drove a 5.4% click rate — far above their 19% email opens in raw click terms. OneSignal's free tier would've cost $99/mo at that subscriber count; Perfecty stayed free but ate ~3 hours/mo of server babysitting.

Gotcha nobody mentions: push subscribers churn invisibly — 30% had stale tokens after 8 weeks (browser uninstalls, cleared data), so "28k subscribers" was really ~20k reachable. Don't bill yourself on the headline number.

My pick: OneSignal to validate the channel free, then Perfecty once subscriber cost would exceed your time value.

Bottom line: price-drop push out-clicks email, but a third of your list silently dies every 2 months — track reachable, not total.