ZeroPush: ‘developer happiness’ in managing mobile app push notifications

Built by two former mobile engineers at Artisan (when it was called appRenaissance), ZeroPush is a service for developers that aims to make it easy to integrate push notifications into iOS and OS X apps

Is doing that a challenge?

Yes, it is, said cofounder Adam Duke, who experienced the hardship firsthand in his consultancy and mobile development company Symmetric Infinity.

“There are a lot of little nuances that make managing your own push notification infrastructure a real pain point,” Duke said in an email. “Apple has designed the services to scale to incredible levels, but the documentation is sparse and in some cases difficult to understand.”

Duke, 31, said ZeroPush’s focus is “developer happiness.”

ZeroPush also offers a service to make sending website notifications easier, as well as notifications with third party platforms like Heroku.

It offers a tiered pricing plan that starts as free for two apps and 5,000 notifications. The most expansive plan is $49.99/month for 1.5 million notifications and 32 apps.

The company’s nearly 200 customers range from small apps with a few hundred installs to larger ones with hundreds of thousands of installs, Duke said. Many of its customers are on the free plan right now, which is to be expected, Duke said, since the company is only a little more than a year old.

Duke, who lives in Swarthmore, and his cofounder Stefan Natchev, who lives in Old City, work out of Neomind Labs‘ Center City office. Duke was formerly the VP of Mobile Engineering at mobile optimization startup Artisan, when it was called appRenaissance. Natchev worked as a mobile architect there, too.